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The compensation for a death sentence is the knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die. A great luxury, but one that is well earned.
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
Great
Sentences
Hour
Dies
Hours
Compensation
Knowledge
Earned
Death
Exact
Wells
Sentence
Well
Luxury
More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
The sun is a thief: she lures the sea and robs it. The moon is a thief: he steals his silvery light from the sun. The sea is a thief: it dissolves the moon.
Vladimir Nabokov
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.
Vladimir Nabokov
There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child.
Vladimir Nabokov
Use unlikely materials. Who would choose Pnin as hero, but how did we live before Pnin?
Vladimir Nabokov
I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel.
Vladimir Nabokov
I am surrounded by some sort of wretched specters, not by people. They torment me as can torment only senseless visions, bad dreams, dregs of delirium, the drivel of nightmares and everything that passes down here for real life.
Vladimir Nabokov
Imagination without knowledge leads no farther than the back yard of primitive art, the child's scrawl on the fence, and the crank's message in the market place. Art is never simple.
Vladimir Nabokov
Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one's awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one's personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth.
Vladimir Nabokov
All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter.
Vladimir Nabokov
There is the first satisfaction of arranging it on a bit of paper after many, many false tries, false moves, finally you have the sentence you recognize as the one you are looking for.
Vladimir Nabokov
And presently I was driving through the drizzle of the dying day, with the windshield wipers in full action but unable to cope with my tears.
Vladimir Nabokov
Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss Poems that take a thousand years to die But ape the immortality of this Red label on a little butterfly .
Vladimir Nabokov
Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.
Vladimir Nabokov
Adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.
Vladimir Nabokov
Literature was not born the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him.
Vladimir Nabokov
I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world’s muteness.
Vladimir Nabokov
Although I do not care for the slogan art for art's sake, there can be no question that what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art.
Vladimir Nabokov
And the rest is rust and stardust.
Vladimir Nabokov
Memory overshadows the present and dims the future into something thicker than its usual pea soup.
Vladimir Nabokov
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
