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Vladimir Nabokov  Quotes
Ink, a Drug.

—Vladimir Nabokov

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DrugsInkWriters-On-Writing
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The moral sense in mortals is the dutyWe have to pay on mortal sense of beauty.

—Vladimir Nabokov

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BeautyMoralityMortality
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There is yet another reason why I cannot, nor wish to, believe in God: the fairy tale about him is not really mine, it belongs to strangers, to all men; it is soaked through by...

—Vladimir Nabokov

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AgnosticismAtheismGod
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Toward nightfall, Khrenov’s temperature had risen. The thermometer was warm, alive—the column of mercury climbed high on the little red ladder. For a long time he muttered unintelligibly, kept biting his lips and gently shaking...

—Vladimir Nabokov

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Short-StoryThe-New-Yorker
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You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

—Vladimir Nabokov

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CountFancyStyle
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Il genio è un africano che vede in sogno la neve.

—Vladimir Nabokov

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Genius
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Let at least one word of my writings impregnate the reader’s heart.

—Vladimir Nabokov

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WritingWriting-Advice
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The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading

—Vladimir Nabokov

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FictionLiteraturePleasure
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I will not mention the name (and what bits of it I happen to give here appear in decorous disguise) of that man, that Franco-Hungarian writer… I would rather not dwell upon him at all,...

—Vladimir Nabokov

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AuthorLiterature
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We who burrow in filth every day may be forgiven perhaps the one sin that ends all sins.

—Vladimir Nabokov

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DebaucherySinSuicide
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Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.

—Vladimir Nabokov

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PhilistineVulgarity
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The day, a compunctious Sunday after a week of blizzards, had been part jewel, part mud. In the midst of my usual afternoon stroll through the small hilly town attached to the girls’ college where...

—Vladimir Nabokov

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IcicleSnowWinter
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Whatever his secret was, I have learnt one secret too, and namely: that the soul is but a manner of being — not a constant state — that any soul may be yours, if you...

—Vladimir Nabokov

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Life-And-DeathSecretSouls
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All religions are based on obsolete terminology.

—Vladimir Nabokov

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FaithPhilosophyPhilosophy-Of-Religion
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The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books.

—Vladimir Nabokov

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ArtStyleWriting
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Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity.

—Vladimir Nabokov

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Imagination
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The Lethean Library, for all its incalculable volumes, is, I know, sadly incomplete without Mr. Goodman’s effort.

—Vladimir Nabokov

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InsultsIronyLiterary-Criticism
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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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Accept
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A sunset, almost formidable in its splendor, would be lingering in the fully exposed sky. Among its imperceptibly changing amassments, one could pick out brightly stained structural details of celestial organisms, or glowing slits in...

—Vladimir Nabokov

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MemoirObservationWriting
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A toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection

—Vladimir Nabokov

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Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.

—Vladimir Nabokov

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Writing
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Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.

—Vladimir Nabokov

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NatureSimple-Minds
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As Ganin looked up at the skeletal roof in the ethereal sky he realized with merciless clarity that his affair with Mary was ended forever. It had lasted no more than four days—four days which...

—Vladimir Nabokov

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DesolationMemoriesSad
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He approaches a cockroach in only one respect: his coloration is brown. That is all. Apart from this he has a tremendous convex belly divided into segments and a hard rounded back suggestive of wing...

—Vladimir Nabokov

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EscapeFriendly-AdviceLitcrit
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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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PastPresent
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I was also supposed to quiz my various companions on a number of important matters such as nostalgia, fear of unknown animals, food fantasies, nocturnal emissions, hobbies, choice of radio program, changes in out look...

—Vladimir Nabokov

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InsanityInspirational
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I clearly understand, first, that the real human being is a poet and, second, that [the tyrant] is the incarnate negation of a poet.

—Vladimir Nabokov

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PoetTyrant
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I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader’s mind. […] Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone...

—Vladimir Nabokov

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ExpectationsFriendship
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Great novels are above all great fairy tales . . . literature does not tell the truth but makes it up.

—Vladimir Nabokov

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Literature
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From his earliest years Cincinnatus, by some strange and happy chance comprehending his danger, carefully managed to conceal a certain peculiarity. He was impervious to the rays of others, and therefore produced when off his...

—Vladimir Nabokov

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DarknessHiding-In-Plain-SightIsolation
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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

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ActivityGroupMediocrity
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This twinned twinkle was delightful but not completely satisfying; or rather it only sharpened my appetite for other tidbits of light and shade, and I walked on in a state of raw awareness that seemed...

—Vladimir Nabokov

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SnowStreetStreet-Scene
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For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone...

—Vladimir Nabokov

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ExistentialismMirrorNabokov
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The square root of I is I.

—Vladimir Nabokov

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EgoPhilosophySelf
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For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where...

—Vladimir Nabokov

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ArtLiteratureLolita
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Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.

—Vladimir Nabokov

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EroticHumorousInsprirational
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All of which does not alter the fact that Pnin was on the wrong train.

—Vladimir Nabokov

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AbsurdityHumorIrony
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The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.

—Vladimir Nabokov

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EvolutionNonsenseSense
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She thought of the recurrent waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had had to endure; of the invisible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the...

—Vladimir Nabokov

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DespairInnocenceInsanity
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Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts

—Vladimir Nabokov

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Myths
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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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AuthorBooksReader
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They were contemplating moving into another house or, more exactly, loudly saying to each other, so as to be overheard by anyone who might be listening, that they were contemplating moving, when all at once...

—Vladimir Nabokov

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ImageryNatureSimile
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For some reason, I kept seeing it—it trembled and silkily glowed on my damp retina—a radiant child of twelve, sitting on a threshold, “pinging” pebbles at an empty can.

—Vladimir Nabokov

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LolitaMemorySad
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In an Anglo-Saxon thriller, the villain is generally punished, and the strong silent man generally wins the weak babbling girl, but there is no governmental law in Western countries to ban a story that does...

—Vladimir Nabokov

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Humor-Inspirational
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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...

—Vladimir Nabokov

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CharactersOftenPast
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A thousand years ago five minutes wereEqual to forty ounces of fine sand.Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime andInfinite aftertime: above your headThey close like giant wings, and you are dead.

—Vladimir Nabokov

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EternityImpermanenceTime
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Non può esservi alcuna sottomissione – perché il fatto stesso che parliamo di questi argomenti indica che vi è curiosità, e la curiosità è insubordinazione nella forma più pura.

—Vladimir Nabokov

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Curiosity
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(T)here exist friendships which develop their own inner duration, their own eons of transparent time.

—Vladimir Nabokov

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Friendship
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Cynthia had been on friendly terms with an eccentric librarian called Porlock who in the last years of his dusty life had been engaged in examining old books for miraculous misprints such as the substitution...

—Vladimir Nabokov

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GrammarMissprintMistake
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a man who has decided upon self-destruction is far removed from mundane affairs, and to sit down and write his will would be, at that moment, an act just as absurd as winding up one’s...

—Vladimir Nabokov

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Suicide
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