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The rich philistinism emanating from advertisements is due not to their exaggerating (or inventing) the glory of this or that serviceable article but to suggesting that the acme of human happiness is purchasable and that its purchase somehow ennobles the purchaser.

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
Happiness
Suggesting
Acme
Human
Article
Ennobles
Humans
Inventing
Emanating
Articles
Purchasers
Dues
Serviceable
Somehow
Exaggerating
Glory
Advertisements
Philistinism
Rich
Purchase
Purchaser

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My God died young. Theolatry i found Degrading, and its premises, unsound. No free man needs God but was I free?
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Was she really beautiful? Was she at least what they call attractive? She was exasperation, she was torture.
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Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
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There are some varieties of fiction that I never touch - mystery stories, for instance, which I abhor, and historical novels. I also detest the so-called powerful novel - full of commonplace obscenities and torrents of dialog.
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Do not be angry with the rain it simply does not know how to fall upwards.
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Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
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Memory overshadows the present and dims the future into something thicker than its usual pea soup.
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As to the rest, I am no more guilty of imitating 'real life' than'real life' is responsible for plagiarizing me.
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Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.
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My principal failing as a writer is the lack of spontaneity the nuisance of parallel thoughts, second thoughts, third thoughts inability to express myself properly in any language unless I compose every damned sentence in my bath, in my mind, at my desk.
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One is always at home in one's past.
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Style and Structure are the essence of a book great ideas are hogwash.
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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 .
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Words without experience are meaningless.
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I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
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Just like a man grieving because he has recently lost in his dreams some thing that he had never had in reality, or hoping that tomorrow he would dream that he found it again. That is how mathematics is created it has its fatal flaw.
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Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.
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No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.
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The lost glove is happy.
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