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"35 Vladimir Nabokov Quotes & Sayings

      Russian     /     View profile
Born: 22 April 1899. Died: 2 July 1977 | Novelist | Poet | Translator | Entomologist |

Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.

Angry Rain Know Fall
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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.

Love Matter Memory More
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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.

Visible Words Pages Blank
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I confess, I do not believe in time.
Believe Confess Time
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Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.

Sunrise Death Even Great
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You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Style Prose Fancy Count
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Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Ideas Book Essence Great
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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.

Rocks Cradle Light Sense
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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.

Surface Fully Home Like
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Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

African Dreams Genius Snow
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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.

Life Delight Enjoy Order
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The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
Wave Explain Sea Whole
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Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.

More Perilous Revelation Revolution
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There is only one school of literature - that of talent.

Literature Only School Talent
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Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.

Passions Man Butterflies Known
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Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.

Vast Obscure Series Existence
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A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.

Poet Precision Scientist Writer
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Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.

Involves Irrational Mysteries Perceived
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Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.

Associated Once Past Smell
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I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.

Write Speak Author Child
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A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.

Work Art Society Only
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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.

Safe Magic Trash Power
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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.

Detail Hard Submit Exceed
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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.

Flesh Love Actual Letter
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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.

Activity Bath Communal Group
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The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.

Evolution Nonsense Sense
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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.

World Fiction Fit Likely
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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.

Blush Contain First Matter
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Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.

Mind Exists State Being
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Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.

Harm Ends Feel Happy
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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.

Movie Long Script Been
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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.

Pine Item After World
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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.

Mind Admirable Good Book
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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.

Tone Mind Gifted Author
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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.

Means Class Know Letting
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Vladimir Nabokov Quotes & Sayings