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Use unlikely materials. Who would choose Pnin as hero, but how did we live before Pnin?

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
Would
Life
Unlikely
Materials
Hero
Choose
Use
Live

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Burn pedants in pale fire. Accept no fashions. Be your own fashion. Do not rely on earlier triumphs. Be new at each appearance.
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And this is the only immortality you and i may share, my Lolita.
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The rich philistinism emanating from advertisements is due not to their exaggerating (or inventing) the glory of this or that serviceable article but to suggesting that the acme of human happiness is purchasable and that its purchase somehow ennobles the purchaser.
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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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To begin with, let us take the following motto...Literature is Love. Now we can continue.
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The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading
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I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze I cannot get out, said the starling
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The square root of I is I.
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All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born.
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The summer night was starless and stirless, with distant spasms of silent lightning.
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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.
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...for the human brain can become the best torture house of all those it has invented, established and used in a millions of years, in millions of lands, on millions of howling creatures.
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Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.
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In and out of my heart flowed my rainbow blood.
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Human thought, flying on the trapezes of the star-filled universe, with mathematics stretched beneath, was like an acrobat working with a net but suddenly noticing that in reality there is no net.
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I adore you, mon petit, and would never allow him to hurt you, no matter how gently or madly.
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I cannot disobey something which I do not know and the reality of which I have the right to deny.
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Above all, beware of platitudes, i.e., word combinations that have already appeared a thousand times.... As a general rule, try to find new combinations of words (not for the sake of their novelty, but because every person sees things in an individual way and must find his own words for them).
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Only talent interests me in paintings and books. Not general ideas, but the individual contribution.
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