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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
Equal
Sentimentality
Easy
Decency
Like
Birds
Combination
Bird
Exactly
Beak
Lead
Beaks
Fool
Wonderfully
More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
The future is but the obsolete in reverse.
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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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Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
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Of all my Russian books, the defense contains and diffuses the greatest 'warmth' which may seem odd seeing how supremely abstract Chess is supposed to be
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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.
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I think she always nursed a small mad hope.
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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 see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.
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I think my favorite fact about myself is that I have never been dismayed by a critic's bilge or bile, and have never once in my life asked or thanked a reviewer for a review.
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Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artistic originality has only itself to copy.
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I think it is all a matter of love.
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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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Most of the dandelions had changed from suns to moons.
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There is no science without fancy and no art without fact.
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My own ultraviolet darling. Lolita
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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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We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended to woo.
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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 have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.
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I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise--a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames--but still a paradise.
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