27 Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov about Writing

  • Author Vladimir Nabokov
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    Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both truth and art.

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  • Author Vladimir Nabokov
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    The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.

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  • Author Vladimir Nabokov
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    The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express is, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before.

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  • Author Vladimir Nabokov
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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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  • Author Vladimir Nabokov
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    After the first shock of recognition - a sudden sense of "this is what I'm going to write" - the novel starts to breed by itself; the process goes on solely in the mind, not on paper. I feel a kind of gentle development, an uncurling inside, and I know that the details are there already, that in fact I would see them plainly if I looked closer, but I prefer to wait until what is loosely called inspiration has completed the task for me.

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  • Author Vladimir Nabokov
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    I do not begin my novel at the beginning, I do not reach chapter three before I reach chapter four, I do not go dutifully from one page to the next, in consecutive order; no, I pick out a bit here and a bit there, till I have filled all the gaps on paper. This is why I like writing my stories and novels on index cards, numbering them later when the whole set is complete. Every card is rewritten many times.

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  • Author Vladimir Nabokov
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    It was an interesting thing to do. Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.

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  • Author Vladimir Nabokov
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    Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.

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