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A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time.

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
Interest
Interests
Philistine
Nature
Ideals
Philistines
Persons
Material
Commonplace
Ideas
Group
Mentality
Person
Materials
Formed
Time
Whose
Conventional
Groups
Stock
Full
Grown

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Chess problems demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity
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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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It is strange how a memory will grow into a wax figure, how the cherub grows suspiciously prettier as its frame darkens with age-strange, strange are the mishaps of memory.
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Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
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The contemplation of beauty, whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, a radiant face, or a work of art, makes us glance back unwittingly at our personal past and juxtapose ourselves and our inner being with the utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us.
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It was an interesting thing to do. Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.
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Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.
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Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.
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Beauty plus pity -- that is the closest we can get to a definition of art.
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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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She was like Marat only with nobody to kill her.
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All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter.
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Use unlikely materials. Who would choose Pnin as hero, but how did we live before Pnin?
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At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.
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Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.
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Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.
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Mind you, sometimes the angels smoke, hiding it with their sleeves, and when the archangel comes, they throw the cigarettes away: that’s when you get shooting stars.
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Freudism and all it has tainted with its grotesque implications and methods, appear to me to be one of the vilest deceits practiced by people on themselves and on others. I reject it utterly, along with a few other medieval items still adored by the ignorant, the conventional, or the very sick.
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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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Imagination without knowledge leads no farther than the back yard of primitive art, the child's scrawl on the fence, and the crank's message in the market place. Art is never simple.
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