Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster. This is the whole of the story and we might have left it at that had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling; and although there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain, bound in moss, the abridged version of a man's life, detail is always welcome.
Quotes to Explore
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I want to stop transforming and just start being.
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My celeb crush is Julia Louis-Dreyfus. She's hysterical, she's beautiful, and she seems like a normal person. I'm in love with her.
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I didn't want to be a number. I didn't want to be an object.
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I don't think that I ever believed that poetry would be a career. I have always thought of poems as something more private than professional... I would never introduce myself as a poet. I will always have some other thing that I am.
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Usually, English personalities are difficult; they don't take criticism easily.
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We must think differently, look at things in a different way. Peace requires a world of new concepts, new definitions.
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If we do a little bit of insight into history, how many times have there been people doing hate discourse, blaming everything on a certain group of people. That really is the genesis of genocide, where it kind of sparks.
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The Ford Flex is a really, really cool car. You get inside and you have so much headroom and it's really comfortable to drive and it's real techy inside. You look at the screen and it's blue and you've got all kinds of controls. Everything is digital.
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I think it's the responsibility of a major opera house not only to cultivate debate and get people thinking, but also to be interfaced with things that challenge them. To challenge its audience and not just deliver things that they know, even though some of those things are wonderful.
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Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life.
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If you sit in a bath of pineapple chunks, it can kill you. That's well documented.
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To me, there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form – and local human passions and conditions and standards – are depicted as native to other worlds and universes.
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My life has become a reality show. When I am home, people are climbing trees with cameras. I feel that my personal space is being encroached upon. I will try and protect it as much as I can.
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I didn't hang around films. I don't know if I'd ever seen Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes.
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The cult of the individual is killing us. I think Twitter signals the death of western civilisation, but people have been saying that since Demosthenes.
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That's the funniest thing about portraying certain things on screen, sitting next to your parents and they get to see this glimpse of me kissing another guy.
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I get half a million just to show up at parties. My life is, like, really, really fun.
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I've loved every minute I've spent in television. And I've had much more failure, as traditionally measured, than success in television. I've done four shows, and only one of them was the 'West Wing.'
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His (Deschamps’) complaint of court life was the same as is made of government at the top in any age: it was composed of hypocrisy, flattery, lying, paying and betraying; it was where calumny and cupidity reigned, common sense lacked, truth dared not appear, and where to survive one had to be deaf, blind, and dumb.
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A writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at least eat a chop. Unless he gets his facts right, his imagination will lead him into all kinds of nonsense, and the facts he is most likely to get right are the facts of his own experience.
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It's really bizarre because no one knows this, but elephants have killed more animal trainers than any other animal.
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I make bold to say that it is profitable for the proud to fall, in order that they may be humbled in that for which they have exalted themselves.
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The world's big things only can be done by paying attention to their humble beginnings.
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Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster. This is the whole of the story and we might have left it at that had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling; and although there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain, bound in moss, the abridged version of a man's life, detail is always welcome.
