Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn’t fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will – with luck – come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise
V.S. NAIPAULIt’s very attractive to people to be a victim. Instead of having to think out the whole situation, about history and your group and what you are doing. If you begin from the point of view of being a victim, you’ve got it half-made. I mean intellectually.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.
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Home is, I suppose just a child’s idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.
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The writer is all alone.
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After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
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As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother’s house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.
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Making a book is such a big enterprise.
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The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves.
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A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
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It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.
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Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
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It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That’s where the mischief starts. That’s where everything starts unravelling.
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The family feuds or the village feuds often had to do with an idea of honor. Perhaps it was a peasant idea; perhaps this idea of honor is especially important to a society without recourse to law or without confidence in law.
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Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
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An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
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To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn’t know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.
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Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it’s complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he’s able to keep processing that as well.
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It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut.
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I became very interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery.
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Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there.
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If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don’t express your disregard for the essence of the culture. It’s a form of aggression.
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Writing has to support itself.
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Small things start us in new ways of thinking.
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I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people’s lands.
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It is important not to trust people too much.
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I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.
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If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
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