All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.
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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In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
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I don’t feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
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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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I’m thought to be a tough writer, but I’m really a softie.
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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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Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
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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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If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
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The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.
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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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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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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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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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The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.
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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.
V.S. NAIPAUL