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

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Solitude is the playfield of Satan.
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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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Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
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The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading
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Treading the soil of the moon, palpating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one's stomach the separation from Terra-these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known . . . this is the only thing I can say about the matter. The utilitarian results do not interest me.
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Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.
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Occasionally, in the middle of a conversation her name would be mentioned, and she would run down the steps of a chance sentence, without turning her head.
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A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time.
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We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended to woo.
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Poor Knight! he really had two periods, the firsta dull man writing broken English, the seconda broken man writing dull English.
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We think not in words but in shadows of words.
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There he stood, in the camouflage of sun and shade, disfigured by them and masked by his own nakedness.
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How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!
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Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
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All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter.
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Use unlikely materials. Who would choose Pnin as hero, but how did we live before Pnin?
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Here lies the sense of literary creation to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in kindly mirrors of future times. . . . To find in objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern . . .
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We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.
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Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing... I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.
Vladimir Nabokov