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Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It's like passing around samples of sputum.

Vladimir Nabokov

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Vladimir Nabokov
Age: 77 †
Born: 1899
Born: January 1
Died: 1977
Died: January 1
Autobiographer
Chess Composer
Chess Player
Journalist
Lepidopterist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
St. Petersburg
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Vladimir Sirin
Vl. Sirin
Wladimir Nabokoff-Sirin
V. Sirin
Rough
Drafts
Passing
Hearty
Around
Exhibit
Writing
Sample
Like
Exhibits
Mediocrity
Mediocrities
Ambitious
Nonentity
Passings
Samples

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Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.
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Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or from afar. Listen, today we are gods! Our blue shadows are enormous! We move in a gigantic, joyful world!
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Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.
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I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.
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Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artistic originality has only itself to copy.
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Let all of life be an unfettered howl.
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Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.
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Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
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The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.
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Style and Structure are the essence of a book great ideas are hogwash.
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A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.
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You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
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For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist.
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for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.
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...for the human brain can become the best torture house of all those it has invented, established and used in a millions of years, in millions of lands, on millions of howling creatures.
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Usually I read several books at a time - old books, new books, fiction, nonfiction, verse, anything - and when the bedside heap of a dozen volumes or so has dwindled to two or three, which generally happens by the end of one week, I accumulate another pile.
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I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel.
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Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries. Oh, Lolita, had you love me thus!
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I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t’aimais, je t’aimais!
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The compensation for a death sentence is the knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die. A great luxury, but one that is well earned.
Vladimir Nabokov