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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

Away

Past

Pine

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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

Home

" 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

Happy

Love

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

" No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading. "

" 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

Darkness

Common Sense

" The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea. "

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

" Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash. "

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

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

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

" Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one. "

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

" 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

Chances

Mind

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

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

" 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. "

" I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is. "

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

Vladimir Nabokov

Child

Speak

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

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

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

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

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