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Chess problems demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity

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
Chess
Insincerity
Harmony
Splendid
Demand
Originality
Problems
Composer
Virtue
Virtues
Art
Worthwhile
Problem
Complexity
Invention
Characterize

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When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past.
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There is only one school of literature - that of talent.
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Let all of life be an unfettered howl.
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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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Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
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Religion has the same relation to man's heavenly condition that mathematics has to his earthly one: both the one and the other are merely the rules of the game. Belief in God and belief in numbers: local truth and truth of location.
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for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.
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My own ultraviolet darling. Lolita
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Memory overshadows the present and dims the future into something thicker than its usual pea soup.
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Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.
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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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The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.
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To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.
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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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Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.
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Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again.
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And yet I am happy. Yes, happy. I swear. I swear that I am happy...What does it matter that I am a bit cheap, a bit foul, and that no one appreciates all the remarkable things about me-my fantasy, my erudition, my literary gift...I am happy that I can gaze at myself, for any man is absorbing-yes, really absorbing! ... I am happy-yes, happy!
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It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.
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Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is.
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A thousand years ago five minutes were Equal to forty ounces of fine sand. Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime and Infinite aftertime: above your head They close like giant wings, and you are dead.
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