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

Vladimir Nabokov

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

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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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" Caress the detail, the divine detail. "

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" Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity. "

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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