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Religion has the same relation to man's heavenly condition that mathematics has to his earthly one: both the one and the other are merely the rules of the game. Belief in God and belief in numbers: local truth and truth of location.

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
Conditions
Locals
Numbers
Local
Game
Heavenly
Belief
Condition
Games
Mathematics
Religion
Relation
Truth
Merely
Earthly
Men
Rules
Location

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

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What surprises you in life? The marvel of consciousness -- that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidts the night of non-being.
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in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members.
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You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.
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My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.
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Only talent interests me in paintings and books. Not general ideas, but the individual contribution.
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I don't want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me.
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My mind speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear prefers French.
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Usually I read several books at a time - old books, new books, fiction, nonfiction, verse, anything - and when the bedside heap of a dozen volumes or so has dwindled to two or three, which generally happens by the end of one week, I accumulate another pile.
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We are most artistically caged.
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There is only one school of literature - that of talent.
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Her lips were like large crimson polyps.
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The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.
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Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing... I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.
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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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Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.
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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. . .
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That swimming, sloping, elusive something about the dark-bluish tint of the iris which seemed still to retain the shadows it had absorbed of ancient, fabulous forests where there were more birds than tigers and more fruit than thorns, and where, in some dappled depth, man's mind had been born.
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In and out of my heart flowed my rainbow blood.
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There is only one real number: one. And love, apparently, is the best exponent of this singularity.
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I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world’s muteness.
Vladimir Nabokov