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

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. "

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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. "

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

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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. "

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" Caress the detail, the divine detail. "

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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. "

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" Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity. "

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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. "

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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. "

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

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

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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. "

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

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

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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. "

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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. "

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

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