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"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."
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"Painting n: the art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic."

"I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting."

"In a movie, you're raw material, just a hue of some color and the director makes the painting."

"But when I worked on a painting I would do it from a drawing but I would put certain things I was fairly sure I wanted in the painting, and then collage on the painting with printed dots or painted paper or something before I really committed it."

"A painting shouldn't be just a picture, it should be a philosophy."

"I never know what it's going to look like. Wouldn't be much point in painting if I already knew the outcome. I have a subject in front of me and I start flooding colour and making marks, I don't know, it's improvisation isn't it?"

"I'm not so facile that I can accomplish or find out what I want to know or explore enough of the possibilities and a way of making a painting, say, in just one painting or two paintings."

"With a painting, you don't have to go back and paint it again."
Explore more quotes by Vladimir Nabokov


"I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die."


"A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die."


"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."


"Great novels are above all great fairy tales . . . literature does not tell the truth but makes it up."


"But after all we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English public school boys who after a night of homosexual romps have to endure the paradox of reading the Ancients in expurgated versions."


"Lighted advertisements went running up dark red facades and dissipating again. He would pass girls; he would turn to look; but the prettier the face, the harder it was to take the plunge."


"The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes."


"Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity."
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