All Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
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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A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
Vladimir Nabokov
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You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
Vladimir Nabokov
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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.
Vladimir Nabokov
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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's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
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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Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
Vladimir Nabokov
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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.
Vladimir Nabokov
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The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.
Vladimir Nabokov
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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.
Vladimir Nabokov
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I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
Vladimir Nabokov
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I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.
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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