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.
V.S. NAIPAULI have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.
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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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.
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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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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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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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I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
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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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A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
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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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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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I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
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Writing has to support itself.
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People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.
V.S. NAIPAUL