It is important not to trust people too much.
V.S. NAIPAULIgnorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
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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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One must always try to see the truth of a situation – it makes things universal.
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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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The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.
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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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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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We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
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Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
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Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
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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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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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People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.
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In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
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If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
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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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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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And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of victory fills a moment and then is over.
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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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That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing – which is never an easy thing to do.
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I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.
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Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
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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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The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
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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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The writer is all alone.
V.S. NAIPAUL