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.
V.S. NAIPAULLife is a helluva thing. You can see trouble coming and you can’t do a damn thing to prevent it coming. You just got to sit and watch and wait.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.
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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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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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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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Small things start us in new ways of thinking.
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Whatever 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
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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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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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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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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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Making a book is such a big enterprise.
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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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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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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.
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His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.
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It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.
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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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One must always try to see the truth of a situation – it makes things universal.
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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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The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.
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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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The world is always in movement.
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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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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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I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people’s lands.
V.S. NAIPAUL