Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.
quote by 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.
quote by Vladimir Nabokov
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The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
quote by Vladimir Nabokov
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The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.
quote by 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.
quote by 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.
quote by 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.
quote by 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.
quote by 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.
quote by 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.
quote by Vladimir Nabokov
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