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

Vladimir Nabokov

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

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

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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. "

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

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

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

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" Genius is an African who dreams up snow. "

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

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

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" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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" All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter. "

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