I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
V.S. NAIPAULI will say I am the sum of my books.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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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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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’.
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You need someone to see what you’ve done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what’s gone into it.
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As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother’s house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.
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I still think it’s really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.
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One isn’t born one’s self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people’s ideas – and you have to work through it all.
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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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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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I’ve never abandoned the novel.
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A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
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My life is short. I can’t listen to banality.
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Writing has to support itself.
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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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I’m my own writer. My material means I’m entirely separate.
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If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
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One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
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It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.
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The writer is all alone.
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To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn’t know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.
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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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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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I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people’s lands.
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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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Writers should provoke disagreement.
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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
V.S. NAIPAUL