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.
V.S. NAIPAULWhatever 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
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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You need someone to see what you’ve done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what’s gone into it.
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I’ve never abandoned the novel.
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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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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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My life is short. I can’t listen to banality.
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In the beginning, before the arrival of the white men, I had considered myself neutral. I had wanted neither side to win, neither the army nor the rebels. As it turned out, both sides lost.
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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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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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You can’t deny what you’ve learned; you can’t deny your travels; you can’t deny the nature of your life.
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All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.
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Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
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Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.
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One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
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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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I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.
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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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People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.
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I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.
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The writer is all alone.
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The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.
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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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The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
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If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.
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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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Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
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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.
V.S. NAIPAUL