I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.
V.S. NAIPAULI profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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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. NAIPAUL -
I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
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’.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
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.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
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.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
My life is short. I can’t listen to banality.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
But everything of value about me is in my books.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
Writing has to support itself.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
In England people are very proud of being very stupid.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
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. NAIPAUL -
I will say I am the sum of my books.
V.S. NAIPAUL