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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

Only

Hard

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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. "

" Caress the detail, the divine detail. "

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

" 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

Blush

Matter

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution. "

Vladimir Nabokov

Revolution

Than

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

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

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

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

" There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion. "

Vladimir Nabokov

While

Motion

" 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. "

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

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

" 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

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

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

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

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

Vladimir Nabokov

Child

Speak

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

" Genius is an African who dreams up snow. "

Vladimir Nabokov

Snow

Imagination

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