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If possible, be Russian. And live in another country. Play chess. Be an active trader between languages. Carry precious metals from one to the other. Remind us of Stravinsky. Know the names of plants and flying creatures. Hunt gauzy wings with snares of gauze. Make science pay tribute. Have a butterfly known by your name.

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
Language
Carry
Russian
Snares
Science
Plant
Plants
Traders
Another
Creatures
Remind
Hunt
Live
Pay
Precious
Hunts
Play
Name
Chess
Tribute
Gauzy
Country
Names
Flying
Metals
Gauze
Make
Possible
Wings
Languages
Stravinsky
Life
Known
Active
Butterfly
Trader

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

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I have no ear for music. When I attend a concert, I endeavor gamely to follow the sequence and relationship of sounds but cannot keep it up for more than a few minutes. Visual impressions, reflections of hands in lacquered wood, a diligent bald spot over a fiddle, take over, and soon I am bored beyond measure by the motions of the musicians.
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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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I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.
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Use unlikely materials. Who would choose Pnin as hero, but how did we live before Pnin?
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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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Who can say what heartbreaks are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp?
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Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don't stop to think, don't interrupt the scream, exhale, release life's rapture.
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I shall be dumped where the weed decays, And the rest is rust and stardust
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Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
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A creative writer must study carefully the works of his rivals, including the Almighty. He must possess the inborn capacity not only of recombining but of re-creating the given world. In order to do this adequately, avoiding duplication of labor, the artist should know the given world.
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A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
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My God died young. Theolatry i found Degrading, and its premises, unsound. No free man needs God but was I free?
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That swimming, sloping, elusive something about the dark-bluish tint of the iris which seemed still to retain the shadows it had absorbed of ancient, fabulous forests where there were more birds than tigers and more fruit than thorns, and where, in some dappled depth, man's mind had been born.
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Life with you was lovely—and when I say lovely, I mean doves and lilies, and velvet, and that soft pink ‘v’ in the middle and the way your tongue curved up to the long, lingering ‘l.’ Our life together was alliterative, and when I think of all the little things which will die, now that we cannot share them, I feel as if we were dead too.
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The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Nymphets do not occur in polar regions.
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I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel.
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Resemblances are the shadows of differences. Different people see different similarities and similar differences.
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I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
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My principal failing as a writer is the lack of spontaneity the nuisance of parallel thoughts, second thoughts, third thoughts inability to express myself properly in any language unless I compose every damned sentence in my bath, in my mind, at my desk.
Vladimir Nabokov