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. NAIPAULLife 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. NAIPAULAll 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. NAIPAULIgnorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
V.S. NAIPAULAfter all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
V.S. NAIPAULAll cultures have been mingled forever.
V.S. NAIPAULThis 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.
V.S. NAIPAULSome 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. NAIPAULJudgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
V.S. NAIPAULThere 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.
V.S. NAIPAULYou need someone to see what you’ve done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what’s gone into it.
V.S. NAIPAULI feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.
V.S. NAIPAULThe world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.
V.S. NAIPAULThe world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
V.S. NAIPAULIn England people are very proud of being very stupid.
V.S. NAIPAULIf 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.
V.S. NAIPAULMost 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.
V.S. NAIPAUL