Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

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

  Vladimir Nabokov

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

  Vladimir Nabokov

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

  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.

  Vladimir Nabokov

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

  Vladimir Nabokov

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

  Vladimir Nabokov

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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.

  Vladimir Nabokov

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

  Vladimir Nabokov

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• Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts.

  Vladimir Nabokov

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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.

  Vladimir Nabokov

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

  Vladimir Nabokov

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• Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.

  Vladimir Nabokov

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• Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.

  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.

  Vladimir Nabokov

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

  Vladimir Nabokov

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• Solitude is the play field of Satan.

  Vladimir Nabokov

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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.

  Vladimir Nabokov

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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.

  Vladimir Nabokov

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• There is only one school of literature – that of talent.

  Vladimir Nabokov

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Vladimir Nabokov (68)

Birth:	22nd April, 1899
Death:	2nd July, 1977
Nationality:	American, Russian
Profession:	Novelist, Professor

About

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a Russian American novelist. Nabokov's first nine novels were in Russian. He then rose to international prominence as a writer of English prose. He also made serious contributions as a lepidopterist and chess composer.

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Today's Anniversary - 22nd April

Births

• 1870 - Vladimir Lenin
• 1816 - Philip James Bailey
• 1919 - Donald J. Cram
• 1899 - Vladimir Nabokov
• 1946 - Paul Davies

Deaths

• 1945 - Kathe Kollwitz
• 1839 - Thomas Haynes Bayly
• 1944 - William H. O`Connell
• 1616 - Miguel de Cervantes
• 2003 - Martha Griffiths