My life is short. I can’t listen to banality.
V.S. NAIPAULAfter all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.
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The writer is all alone.
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His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.
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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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It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.
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Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
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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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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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The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.
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The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.
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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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If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.
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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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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.
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Home is, I suppose just a child’s idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.
V.S. NAIPAUL