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" A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist. "

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

" 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. "

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" I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child. "

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" My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. "

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

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" It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot. "

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" I confess, I do not believe in time. "

Vladimir Nabokov

" A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual. "

Vladimir Nabokov

" 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. "

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

Vladimir Nabokov

" 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

" Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words. "

Vladimir Nabokov

" 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

" 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

" Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it. "

Vladimir Nabokov

" There is only one school of literature - that of talent. "

Vladimir Nabokov

" 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

" Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man. "

Vladimir Nabokov

" Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution. "

Vladimir Nabokov

" A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader. "

Vladimir Nabokov

" I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst. "

Vladimir Nabokov

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

Vladimir Nabokov

" 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

" You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. "

Vladimir Nabokov

" Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know. "

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

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

Vladimir Nabokov

" Satire is a lesson, parody is a game. "

Vladimir Nabokov

" 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

" 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