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The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.

Vladimir Nabokov

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Vladimir Nabokov

The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.

Vladimir Nabokov

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.

Vladimir Nabokov

Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.

Vladimir Nabokov

Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.

Vladimir Nabokov

Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.

Vladimir Nabokov

There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.

Vladimir Nabokov

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

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

You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Vladimir Nabokov

There is only one school of literature - that of talent.

Vladimir Nabokov

To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.

Vladimir Nabokov

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.

Vladimir Nabokov

Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.

Vladimir Nabokov