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

Vladimir Nabokov

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" Genius is an African who dreams up snow. "

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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. "

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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. "

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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. "

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

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" Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution. "

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

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

Vladimir Nabokov

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

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

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

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

Vladimir Nabokov

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

Vladimir Nabokov

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

Vladimir Nabokov

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

Vladimir Nabokov

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

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

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

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

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

Vladimir Nabokov

" Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity. "

Vladimir Nabokov

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

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

" 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

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

Vladimir Nabokov

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

Vladimir Nabokov

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

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

" 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

" 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