One must always try to see the truth of a situation – it makes things universal.
V.S. NAIPAULYou can’t deny what you’ve learned; you can’t deny your travels; you can’t deny the nature of your life.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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I will say I am the sum of my books.
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If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.
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Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
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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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The world is always in movement.
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Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
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Argentine political life is like the life of an ant community or an African forest tribe: full of events, full of crisis and deaths, but life is always cyclical, and the year ends as it begins.
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If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
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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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It’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.
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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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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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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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One isn’t born one’s self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people’s ideas – and you have to work through it all.
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All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.
V.S. NAIPAUL