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.
V.S. NAIPAULThe only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
-
-
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.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
Argentine political life is like the life of an ant community or an African forest tribe: full of events, full of crisis and deaths, but life is always cyclical, and the year ends as it begins.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
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. NAIPAUL -
There are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
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.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people’s lands.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
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.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
You can’t deny what you’ve learned; you can’t deny your travels; you can’t deny the nature of your life.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
In England people are very proud of being very stupid.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
Writing has to support itself.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That’s where the mischief starts. That’s where everything starts unravelling.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
The writer is all alone.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid people; and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and common.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
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.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
I’m thought to be a tough writer, but I’m really a softie.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
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 -
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.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
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 -
Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
V.S. NAIPAUL