I will say I am the sum of my books.
V.S. NAIPAULIn a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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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 know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
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Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
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If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
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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 is important not to trust people too much.
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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 world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.
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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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If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
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We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
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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 only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
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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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I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
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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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I’m thought to be a tough writer, but I’m really a softie.
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The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.
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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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The first 50 years of the cinema were absolutely great years. Original minds were at work establishing the ways to tell a story. And what is happening now is a copying, a pastiche-ing of what was done by great men.
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Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
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Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
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I’ve never abandoned the novel.
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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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When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.
V.S. NAIPAUL