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The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.

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
Useful
Thousand
Times
Paraphrase
Prettiest
Translation
Translations
Literal

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

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for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.
Vladimir Nabokov
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I am surrounded by some sort of wretched specters, not by people. They torment me as can torment only senseless visions, bad dreams, dregs of delirium, the drivel of nightmares and everything that passes down here for real life.
Vladimir Nabokov
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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.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Do those clowns really believe what they teach?
Vladimir Nabokov
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That swimming, sloping, elusive something about the dark-bluish tint of the iris which seemed still to retain the shadows it had absorbed of ancient, fabulous forests where there were more birds than tigers and more fruit than thorns, and where, in some dappled depth, man's mind had been born.
Vladimir Nabokov
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And she was mine, she was mine, the key was in my fist, my fist was in my pocket, she was mine.
Vladimir Nabokov
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I don't read reviews about myself with any special eagerness or attention unless they are masterpieces of wit and acumen, and I never reread them.
Vladimir Nabokov
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We all have such fateful objects -- it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another -- carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of specific significance for us: here shall John always stumble there shall Jane's heart always break.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Occasionally, in the middle of a conversation her name would be mentioned, and she would run down the steps of a chance sentence, without turning her head.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Although I do not care for the slogan art for art's sake, there can be no question that what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art.
Vladimir Nabokov
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A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.
Vladimir Nabokov
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It is strange that the tactile sense, which is so infinitely less precious to men than sight, becomes at critical moments our main, if not only, handle to reality.
Vladimir Nabokov
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I don't think in any language. I think in images.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Why do those people guess so much and shave so little, and are so disdainful of hearing aids?
Vladimir Nabokov
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Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical.
Vladimir Nabokov
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I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel.
Vladimir Nabokov
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The social or economic structure of the ideal state is of little concern to me. My desires are modest. Portraits of the head of the government should not exceed a postage stamp in size. No torture and no executions. No music, except coming through earphones, or played in theaters. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of art.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.
Vladimir Nabokov