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.
V.S. NAIPAULAnd 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.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
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The world is always in movement.
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I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
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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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It is important not to trust people too much.
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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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Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
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An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
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I will say I am the sum of my books.
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Life is a helluva thing. You can see trouble coming and you can’t do a damn thing to prevent it coming. You just got to sit and watch and wait.
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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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It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.
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Writers should provoke disagreement.
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All cultures have been mingled forever.
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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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The writer is all alone.
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After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
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A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
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In the beginning, before the arrival of the white men, I had considered myself neutral. I had wanted neither side to win, neither the army nor the rebels. As it turned out, both sides lost.
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Writing has to support itself.
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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.
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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’ve never abandoned the novel.
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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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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 became very interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery.
V.S. NAIPAUL