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Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique dazzling gift. The gift of James Joyce, and not the talent of Henry James.
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
Still
Phrases
Mean
Gift
Fastidiousness
Unique
Joyce
Pride
Dazzling
Genius
Henry
Talent
Phrase
Means
Russian
Stills
James
More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
…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.
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...for the human brain can become the best torture house of all those it has invented, established and used in a millions of years, in millions of lands, on millions of howling creatures.
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Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical.
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A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
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A good laugh is the best pesticide.
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I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world’s muteness.
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I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/By the false azure in the windowpane.
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Human thought, flying on the trapezes of the star-filled universe, with mathematics stretched beneath, was like an acrobat working with a net but suddenly noticing that in reality there is no net.
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Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.
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My own ultraviolet darling. Lolita
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Beauty plus pity-that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual.
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I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t’aimais, je t’aimais!
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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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She was like Marat only with nobody to kill her.
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The future is but the obsolete in reverse.
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I confess, I do not believe in time.
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Solitude is the playfield of Satan.
Vladimir Nabokov
My mind speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear prefers French.
Vladimir Nabokov
A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me. I don't give a damn for the group, the community, the masses, and so forth.
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Only one letter divides the comic from the cosmic.
Vladimir Nabokov
