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It is a singular reaction, this sitting still and writing, writing, writing, or ruminating at length, which is much the same, really.

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
Reactions
Sitting
Stills
Still
Writing
Ruminating
Much
Singular
Really
Reaction
Length

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

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Do not be awed by giant predecessors. Be ill-tempered with their renown. Point out flaws. Frighten interviewers from Time. Appear in Playboy. Sell to the movies.
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Dear Jesus, do something.
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My answer to your question'Does the writer have a social responsibility?' is NO.You owe me ten cents, sir.
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I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world’s muteness.
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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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The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.
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Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.
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for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.
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Even while writing his book, he had become painfully aware how little he knew his own planet while attempting to piece together another one from jagged bits filched from deranged brains.
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The days of my youth, as I look back on them, seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation car.
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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.
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There are teachers and students with square minds who are by nature meant to undergo the fascination of catagories. For them, 'schools' and 'movements' are everything by painting a group symbol on the brow of mediocrity, they condone their own incomprehension of true genius.
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Solitude is the playfield of Satan.
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You lose your immortality when you lose your memory.
Vladimir Nabokov
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She was like Marat only with nobody to kill her.
Vladimir Nabokov
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if a violin string could ache, i would be that string.
Vladimir Nabokov
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It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.
Vladimir Nabokov
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I was also supposed to quiz my various companions on a number of important matters such as nostalgia, fear of unknown animals, food fantasies, nocturnal emissions, hobbies, choice of radio program, changes in out look and so forth.
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Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future.
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Burn pedants in pale fire. Accept no fashions. Be your own fashion. Do not rely on earlier triumphs. Be new at each appearance.
Vladimir Nabokov