Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It's like passing around samples of sputum.

Quotes to Explore
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Some people ask, 'How do you attract the young and so many different people when your poetry is complicated and different?' I say, 'My accomplishment is that my readers trust me and accept my suggestions for change.'
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Let me just say as one who has been speaker of the House, I've had to have a very thick skin about every kind of thing that was thrown at me.
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I have worked hard and learnt that I have to make a decision - whether I am going to conform and protect myself or not. I chose not to.
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We must always remember that the Chinese revolution was not a peasant's revolution, but one of the extreme Right.
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I have never thought of a full-fledged career in Bollywood because boxing has never left my mind. But you never know.
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After World War I the resentment of the working class against all that it had to suffer was directed more against Morgan, Wall Street and private capital than the government.
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As a woman, I've learned that having a uniform of your staples or setting your look and saying what distinguishes you - like red lips or hair or whatever - leaves so much time for the rest of the day.
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I myself feel that I'm a well-rounded player and got a lot better defensively and without the puck as time has gone on.
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To understand how Republicans lost the African American vote, we must first understand how we won the African American vote.
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I'm not a one-issue person.
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I had these experiences as a kid; I remember certain things happening in school that were horrifying that I would see, certain things of violence or certain things of cruelty, but around that, something might happen afterwards to cause everyone to laugh, and that always blew me away.
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I knew that I wanted to be an actor; how to go about it was the question. I went to Australia for my studies; from there I told my dad that I also want to do a course in performing arts, but my father refused. So I completed my studies and came back. But I kept poking him, saying that acting is something that I want to do.
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I don't need fame and I don't need power and I don't need wealth. I'm in need of friends, which I have found in abundance.
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If we want more trade in the world, we should establish bilateral trade agreements with other democratic countries. That way we can control the decision-making process. The major economic countries of the world will enter into those agreements.
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I haven't had that many weird encounters with fans, thank God.
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I do not know You, God, because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside.
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Let me tell you that I love the United States.
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We should develop anti-satellite weapons because we could not have prevailed without them in 'Red Storm Rising'.
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For me personally, I'm always writing from what's happening in my emotional life. Even without thinking about it a lot of the time, it comes out in the songs that I'm writing.
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Writing a screenplay, for me, is like juggling. It's like, how many balls can you get in the air at once? All those ideas have to float out there to a certain point, and then they'll crystallize into a pattern.
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Writing 'The Spirit' is really fun.
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I want to say something about bad writing. I'm proud of my bad writing. Everyone is so intelligent lately, and stylish. Fucking great. I am proud of Philip Guston's bad painting, I am proud of Baudelaire's mamma's boy goo goo misery. Sometimes the lurid or shitty means having a heart, which's something you have to try to have. Excellence nowadays is too general and available to be worth prizing: I am interested in people who have to find strange and horrible ways to just get from point a to point b.
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He never seemed to grasp the immense mutability of human nature, nor to appreciate that behind every nondescript face lay a wild and unique hinterland like his own.
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Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It's like passing around samples of sputum.