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Age indomitably, in the European manner. Do not finish your labours young. Be a planet, not a meteor. Honor the working day. Sit at your desk.

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
Planet
Labours
Planets
Meteors
Honor
Desk
Working
Desks
Age
Finish
Young
European
Life
Labour
Manner
Meteor

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And what is death, if not a face at peace - its artistic perfection.
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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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Dostoevky's lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity - all this is difficult to admire.
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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 knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.
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For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist.
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Look at this tangle of thorns.
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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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A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.
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A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.
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We are most artistically caged.
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When I receive a new novel from a hopeful publisher - hoping that I like the book as much as he does - I check first of all how much dialog there is, and if it looks too abundant or too sustained, I shut the book with a bang.
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You lose your immortality when you lose your memory.
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...and the red sun of desire and decision (the two things that create a live world) rose higher and higher, while upon a succession of balconies a succession of libertines, sparkling glass in hand, toasted the bliss of past and future nights.
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Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity.
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while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.
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Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It's like passing around samples of sputum.
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A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me. I don't give a damn for the group, the community, the masses, and so forth.
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The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.
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Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac) and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as nymphets.
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