Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
Do not be awed by giant predecessors. Be ill-tempered with their renown. Point out flaws. Frighten interviewers from Time. Appear in Playboy. Sell to the movies.
Quotes to Explore
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I love my wife, I love my kids.
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I dislike society because conversation exhausts my brain more than silent thought - again, I cannot hold my water long enough for a prolonged conversation.
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Any time Chris Nolan wants to call me for advice, he can.
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It took me 14 years to write poems about Vietnam. I had never thought about writing about it, and in a way I had been systematically writing around it.
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It was my mother's idea. Her feeling was that I didn't have the intelligence to pick a trade myself.
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You have to realize that up until about 1959, Africa was dominated by the colonial powers. And by the colonial powers of Europe having complete control over Africa, they projected Africa always in a negative light - jungles, savages, cannibals, nothing civilized.
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I have often heard that the novel is dead. But I see novels produced, I don't know how many a week, in France. I have the impression it's carrying along quite well.
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Sometimes I wake up, I feel like, I'm like 80-years-old.
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No matter how much technology changes scouting, no matter how much free agency and big TV contracts change the business of baseball, I hope and pray that the heart of the game will never change.
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I will say I am the sum of my books.
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Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.
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My experience is that's rare - that you have a script that is... what they call 'film-ready.'
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You can crush any woman by suggesting that she's fat, not even saying the word 'fat' but just suggesting she's fat.
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There is a magnet in your heart that will attract true friends. That magnet is unselfishness, thinking of others first; when you learn to live for others, they will live for you.
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Serial killers are everywhere! Well, perhaps not in our neighborhood, but on our television screens, at the movie theatres, and in rows and rows of books at our local Borders or Barnes and Noble Booksellers.
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I'm not very technically minded. I mean, I don't know how to do e-mail on computers.
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I love having wine with my meals. And if I splurge, I'm going to splurge big, because if I deny my cravings, it just ends up backfiring on me, you know?
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I bartended for a catering company for two or three years.
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Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions.
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Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There's a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don't reconcile the poles. You just recognize them.
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If you have a smartphone - and you have a smartphone - then you have a comic book store in your pocket. So you don't have to get over any social anxiety you have about entering that space.
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English poetry begins whenever we decide to say the modern English language begins, and it extends as far as we decide to say that the English language extends.
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Acting is a life of rejection.
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Do not be awed by giant predecessors. Be ill-tempered with their renown. Point out flaws. Frighten interviewers from Time. Appear in Playboy. Sell to the movies.
