Quote

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

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do what only a true artist can do ... pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation
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A good laugh is the best pesticide.
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There is an old American saying 'He who lives in a glass house should not try to kill two birds with one stone.
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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.
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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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Our best yesterdays are now foul piles of crumpled names.
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The future is but the obsolete in reverse.
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if a violin string could ache, i would be that string.
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She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
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Dear Jesus, do something.
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Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoievsky as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist.
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I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist.
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I should allow only my heart to have imagination and for the rest rely on memory, that long drawn sunset of one's personal truth.
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I witness with pleasure the supreme achievement of memory, which is the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past.
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A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle.
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Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.
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I think she always nursed a small mad hope.
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Those Eggheadsareterrible Philistines. A realgood head is not oval but round.
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