Writing has to support itself.
V.S. NAIPAULThe past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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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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Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
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But everything of value about me is in my books.
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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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Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
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In England people are very proud of being very stupid.
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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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That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing – which is never an easy thing to do.
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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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When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.
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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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I’m my own writer. My material means I’m entirely separate.
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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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We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
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If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.
V.S. NAIPAUL