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

Vladimir Nabokov

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

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

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" Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity. "

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

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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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" Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution. "

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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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" 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 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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" 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. "

Vladimir Nabokov

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

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

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

Vladimir Nabokov

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

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

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

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

Vladimir Nabokov

" Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know. "

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

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

Vladimir Nabokov

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

Vladimir Nabokov

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

Vladimir Nabokov

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

Vladimir Nabokov