There are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to.
V.S. NAIPAULSome 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.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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I’ve never abandoned the novel.
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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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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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It is important not to trust people too much.
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It has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say ‘my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn’t matter’.
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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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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
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Writing has to support itself.
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If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.
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It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.
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My life is short. I can’t listen to banality.
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But everything of value about me is in my books.
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After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
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The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
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Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
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Life doesn’t have a neat beginning and a tidy end; life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should be all there.
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I’m my own writer. My material means I’m entirely separate.
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The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
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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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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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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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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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Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.
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The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.
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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.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
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.
V.S. NAIPAUL