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Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.

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
Fantastically
Deceitful
Complexes
Complex
Greatest
Art

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

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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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a person hoping to become a poet must have the capacity of thinking of several things at a time.
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Which arrow flies for ever? The arrow that has hit its mark.
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She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
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Memory overshadows the present and dims the future into something thicker than its usual pea soup.
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Treading the soil of the moon, palpating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one's stomach the separation from Terra-these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known . . . this is the only thing I can say about the matter. The utilitarian results do not interest me.
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We are most artistically caged.
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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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Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
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It is nothing but a kind of a microcosmos of communism - all that psychiatry', rumbled Pnin ... 'Why not leave their private sorrow to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?
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I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright world of illustrated books, clean sand, orange trees, friendly dogs, sea vistas and smiling faces.
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Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoievsky as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist.
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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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Mnemosyne, one must admit, has shown herself to be a very careless girl.
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Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.
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A toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection.
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All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born.
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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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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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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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