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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
Complex
Greatest
Art
Fantastically
Deceitful
Complexes

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We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.
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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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And yet I adore him. I think he's quite crazy, and with no place or occupation in life, and far from happy, and philosophically irresponsible – and there is absolutely nobody like him.
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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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The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.
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I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.
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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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Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artistic originality has only itself to copy.
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My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
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Literature was not born the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him.
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The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading
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The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, has ceased to be vicious it has been set free.
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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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Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
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All religions are based on obsolete terminology.
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She was like Marat only with nobody to kill her.
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Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.
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There he stood, in the camouflage of sun and shade, disfigured by them and masked by his own nakedness.
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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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