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.
V.S. NAIPAULThe world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
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The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid people; and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and common.
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I will say I am the sum of my books.
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My life is short. I can’t listen to banality.
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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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I still think it’s really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.
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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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Small things start us in new ways of thinking.
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I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
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One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
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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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The world is always in movement.
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The first 50 years of the cinema were absolutely great years. Original minds were at work establishing the ways to tell a story. And what is happening now is a copying, a pastiche-ing of what was done by great men.
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I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
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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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The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
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And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of victory fills a moment and then is over.
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I’m my own writer. My material means I’m entirely separate.
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This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true.
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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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His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.
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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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Writers should provoke disagreement.
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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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Making a book is such a big enterprise.
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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.
V.S. NAIPAUL