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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.
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
Sell
Tempered
Appear
Frighten
Sells
Playboy
Movies
Predecessors
Point
Giant
Time
Flaws
Awed
Life
Giants
Interviewers
Ill
Renown
More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
She was like Marat only with nobody to kill her.
Vladimir Nabokov
The general impression is that fifteen year-old Dolly remains morbidly uninterested in sexual matters, or to be exact, represses her curiosity in order to save her ignorance and self-dignity.
Vladimir Nabokov
Life is a message scribbled in the dark.
Vladimir Nabokov
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.
Vladimir Nabokov
And she was mine, she was mine, the key was in my fist, my fist was in my pocket, she was mine.
Vladimir Nabokov
A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.
Vladimir Nabokov
What surprises you in life? The marvel of consciousness -- that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidts the night of non-being.
Vladimir Nabokov
My characters are galley slaves.
Vladimir Nabokov
for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.
Vladimir Nabokov
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.
Vladimir Nabokov
A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
Vladimir Nabokov
Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.
Vladimir Nabokov
Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical.
Vladimir Nabokov
Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!
Vladimir Nabokov
The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express is, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before.
Vladimir Nabokov
And really, the reason we think of death in celestial terms is that the visible firmament, especially at night (above our blacked-out Paris with the gaunt arches of its Boulevard Exelmans and the ceaseless Alpine gurgle of desolate latrines), is the most adequate and ever-present symbol of that vast silent explosion.
Vladimir Nabokov
I believe the poor fierce-eyed child had figured out that with a mere fifty dollars in her purse she might somehow reach Broadway or Hollywood - or the foul kitchen of a diner (Help Wanted) in a dismal ex-prairie state, with the wind blowing, and the stars blinking, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen, and everything soiled, torn, dead.
Vladimir Nabokov
My answer to your question'Does the writer have a social responsibility?' is NO.You owe me ten cents, sir.
Vladimir Nabokov
Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.
Vladimir Nabokov
The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading
Vladimir Nabokov
