Vladimir Nabokov

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I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
- Vladimir Nabokov
Collection: Love
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Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
- Vladimir Nabokov
Collection: Death
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Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
- Vladimir Nabokov
Collection: Dreams
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I confess, I do not believe in time.
- Vladimir Nabokov
Collection: Time
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A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.
- Vladimir Nabokov
Collection: Art
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A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
- Vladimir Nabokov
Collection: Imagination
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Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.
- Vladimir Nabokov
Collection: Teacher
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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.
- Vladimir Nabokov
Collection: Imagination
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There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.
- Vladimir Nabokov
Collection: Funny
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Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
- Vladimir Nabokov
Collection: Poetry
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The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
- Vladimir Nabokov
Collection: Nature
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Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
- Vladimir Nabokov
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The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
- Vladimir Nabokov
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Caress the detail, the divine detail.
- Vladimir Nabokov
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Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
- Vladimir Nabokov
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Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.
- Vladimir Nabokov
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There is only one school of literature - that of talent.
- Vladimir Nabokov
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My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
- Vladimir Nabokov
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The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.
- Vladimir Nabokov
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Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.
- Vladimir Nabokov
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I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.
- Vladimir Nabokov
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Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
- Vladimir Nabokov
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Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.
- Vladimir Nabokov
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The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.
- Vladimir Nabokov
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It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.
- Vladimir Nabokov
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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.
- Vladimir Nabokov
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There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.
- 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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I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
- Vladimir Nabokov
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Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.
- Vladimir Nabokov
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The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.
- Vladimir Nabokov
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All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.
- Vladimir Nabokov
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Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.
- Vladimir Nabokov
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Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.
- Vladimir Nabokov
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I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.
- Vladimir Nabokov
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Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.
- Vladimir Nabokov
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No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.
- Vladimir Nabokov
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To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.
- Vladimir Nabokov
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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
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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
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You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
- Vladimir Nabokov
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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
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I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.
- Vladimir Nabokov
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Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.
- Vladimir Nabokov
Collection: Two
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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.
- Vladimir Nabokov
Collection: Stars
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Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.
- Vladimir Nabokov
Collection: Inspirational
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Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.
- Vladimir Nabokov
Collection: Loneliness
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And the rest is rust and stardust.
- Vladimir Nabokov
Collection: Rust
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Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.
- Vladimir Nabokov
Collection: Curiosity
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Genius is finding the invisible link between things.
- Vladimir Nabokov
Collection: Genius