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

Vladimir Nabokov

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

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" 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. "

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

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" Caress the detail, the divine detail. "

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

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

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

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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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" Genius is an African who dreams up snow. "

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

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

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

" 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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" 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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" 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

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

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" Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity. "

Vladimir Nabokov

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

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

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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. "

Vladimir Nabokov

" 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

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

Vladimir Nabokov

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

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

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

Vladimir Nabokov

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

Vladimir Nabokov