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My mind speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear prefers French.

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
Speaks
French
English
Ears
Speak
Heart
Mind
Prefers
Russian

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

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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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do what only a true artist can do ... pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation
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Those Eggheadsareterrible Philistines. A realgood head is not oval but round.
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At a very early stage of the novel's development I get this urge to collect bits of straw and fluff, and to eat pebbles. Nobody will ever discover how clearly a bird visualizes, or if it visualizes at all, the future nest and the eggs in it.
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I have never seen a more lucid, more lonely, better balanced mad mind than mine.
Vladimir Nabokov
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No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Was she really beautiful? Was she at least what they call attractive? She was exasperation, she was torture.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Ideas in modern Russia are machine-cut blocks coming in solid colors the nuance is outlawed, the interval walled up, the curve grossly stepped.
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Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.
Vladimir Nabokov
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I don't read reviews about myself with any special eagerness or attention unless they are masterpieces of wit and acumen, and I never reread them.
Vladimir Nabokov
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We all have such fateful objects -- it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another -- carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of specific significance for us: here shall John always stumble there shall Jane's heart always break.
Vladimir Nabokov
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And I want to rise up, throw my arms open for a vast embrace, address an ample, luminous discourse to the invisible crowds. I would start like this: O rainbow-colored gods. . .
Vladimir Nabokov
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Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
Vladimir Nabokov
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There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.
Vladimir Nabokov
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…She was, obviously, one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book club or bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but never her soul.
Vladimir Nabokov
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For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me.
Vladimir Nabokov
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if a violin string could ache, i would be that string.
Vladimir Nabokov
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The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
Vladimir Nabokov
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There is no science without fancy and no art without fact.
Vladimir Nabokov
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As to the rest, I am no more guilty of imitating 'real life' than'real life' is responsible for plagiarizing me.
Vladimir Nabokov