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. NAIPAULThe 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.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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I will say I am the sum of my books.
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One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
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All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.
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The writer is all alone.
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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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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 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.
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Writing has to support itself.
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I don’t feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
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Making a book is such a big enterprise.
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The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
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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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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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My life is short. I can’t listen to banality.
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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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If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
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It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That’s where the mischief starts. That’s where everything starts unravelling.
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Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
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I’m thought to be a tough writer, but I’m really a softie.
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If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.
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I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
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After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
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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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People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.
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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.
V.S. NAIPAUL