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"A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader."
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"What I'd show you is much more bizarre than anything we have looked at so far, and I warn you in advance that the first impulse will be to laugh. That's all right. Laugh if you must. Just don't take your eye off what you see, for even in your imagination, here is a creature who can do you damage."
"Novelists are basically inviting their readers to play a game of pretend. That's what fiction is: a game of pretend."
"Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn't happen, but other planets."
"Imminent GM bankruptcy was always fiction, created by Wall Street and the media."
"A man walked across the moors from Razorback to Lancre town without seeing a single marshlight, head-less dog, strolling tree, ghostly coach or comet, and had to be taken in by a tavern and given a drink to unsteady his nerves."
"Flakes of snow swirled and danced across the porch. The Overlook faced it as it had for nearly three-quarters of a century, its darkened windows now bearded with snow, indifferent to the fact it was now cut off from the world. Inside its shell the three of them went about their early evening routine, like microbes trapped in the intestine of a monster."
"Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity."
"You can't burn down a made-up place."
"A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning."
Explore more quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
"The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind."
"It is interesting to ponder the fact that there is no real difference between what the Western Fascists wanted of literature and what the Bolsheviks want. Let me quote: "The personality of the artist should develop freely and without restraint. One thing, however, we demand: acknowledgement of our creed. Thus spoke one of the big Nazis, Dr. Rosenberg, Minister of Culture in Hitler's Germany. Another quote: "Every artist has the right to create freely; but we, Communists, must guide him according to plan. Thus spoke Lenin. Both of these are textual quotations, and their similitude would have been highly diverting had not the whole thing been so very sad."
"When we remember our former selves, there is always that little figure with its long shadow stopping like an uncertain belated visitor on a lighted threshold at the far end of some impeccably narrowing corridor."
"Every author believes, when his first book is published, that those that acclaim it are his personal friends or impersonal peers, while its revilers can only be envious rogues and nonentities."
"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."
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