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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
Really
Reaction
Length
Reactions
Sitting
Stills
Still
Writing
Ruminating
Much
Singular

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We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.
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I do not see any essential difference between abstract and primitive art. Both are simple and sincere. Naturally, we should not generalize in these matters: It is the individual artist that counts.
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Age indomitably, in the European manner. Do not finish your labours young. Be a planet, not a meteor. Honor the working day. Sit at your desk.
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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.
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Resemblances are the shadows of differences. Different people see different similarities and similar differences.
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It was an interesting thing to do. Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.
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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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My Carmen, I said (I used to call her that sometimes) we shall leave this raw sore town as soon as you get out of bed. ... Because, really, I continued, there is no point in staying here. There is no point in staying anywhere, said Lolita.
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The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading
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The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, has ceased to be vicious it has been set free.
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Was she really beautiful? Was she at least what they call attractive? She was exasperation, she was torture.
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It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
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Let all of life be an unfettered howl.
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Adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.
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Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.
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I have never seen a more lucid, more lonely, better balanced mad mind than mine.
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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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No difference exists between American and European manners. A proletarian from Chicago can be just as Philistine as an English duke.
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No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.
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The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.
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