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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.
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
Responsible
Rest
Real
Life
Plagiarizing
Imitating
Guilty
More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
His wings were failing, but he refused to fall without a struggle.
Vladimir Nabokov
But in my arms she was always Lolita.
Vladimir Nabokov
Pnin slowly walked under solemn pines. The sky was dying. He did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts. The souls of the dead, perhaps, formed committees, and these, in continuous session, attended the destinies of the quick.
Vladimir Nabokov
Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.
Vladimir Nabokov
I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world’s muteness.
Vladimir Nabokov
And this is the only immortality you and i may share, my Lolita.
Vladimir Nabokov
Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for.
Vladimir Nabokov
A creative writer must study carefully the works of his rivals, including the Almighty. He must possess the inborn capacity not only of recombining but of re-creating the given world. In order to do this adequately, avoiding duplication of labor, the artist should know the given world.
Vladimir Nabokov
The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading
Vladimir Nabokov
The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
Vladimir Nabokov
All religions are based on obsolete terminology.
Vladimir Nabokov
A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
Vladimir Nabokov
It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.
Vladimir Nabokov
All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me.
Vladimir Nabokov
Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac) and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as nymphets.
Vladimir Nabokov
The commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in his own books and lectures, namely that offensive is frequently but a synonym for unusual and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature should come more or less as a shocking surprise.
Vladimir Nabokov
She was like Marat only with nobody to kill her.
Vladimir Nabokov
There is an old American saying 'He who lives in a glass house should not try to kill two birds with one stone.
Vladimir Nabokov
I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies - every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost.
Vladimir Nabokov
I think she always nursed a small mad hope.
Vladimir Nabokov
