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Old birds like Orlovius are wonderfully easy to lead by the beak, because a combination of decency and sentimentality is exactly equal to being a fool.

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
Exactly
Beak
Lead
Beaks
Fool
Wonderfully
Equal
Sentimentality
Easy
Decency
Like
Birds
Combination
Bird

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Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.
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A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.
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The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.
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Suddenly for no earthly reason I felt immensely sorry for him and longed to say something real, something with wings and a heart, but the birds I wanted settled on my shoulders and head only later when I was alone and not in need of words.
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...All my best words are deserters and do not answer the trumpet call, and the remainder are cripples.
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Solitude was corrupting me.
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Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle.
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Caress the detail, the divine detail.
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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.
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Stirless, I stand at the window, and in the black bowl of the sky glows like a golden drop of honey the mellow moon
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Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
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To begin with, let us take the following motto...Literature is Love. Now we can continue.
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A good laugh is the best pesticide.
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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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We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.
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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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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.
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I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.
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Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.
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