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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. "

Vladimir Nabokov

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

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

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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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" 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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" Genius is an African who dreams up snow. "

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" Caress the detail, the divine detail. "

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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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" 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

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

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

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

Vladimir Nabokov

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

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

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

Vladimir Nabokov

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

Vladimir Nabokov

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

Vladimir Nabokov

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

Vladimir Nabokov

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

Vladimir Nabokov

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

Vladimir Nabokov

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

Vladimir Nabokov

" Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity. "

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

" 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

" 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

" Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution. "

Vladimir Nabokov

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

Vladimir Nabokov

" 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

" I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is. "

Vladimir Nabokov