I’m thought to be a tough writer, but I’m really a softie.
V.S. NAIPAULIf you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don’t express your disregard for the essence of the culture. It’s a form of aggression.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
-
-
I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don’t express your disregard for the essence of the culture. It’s a form of aggression.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
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.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
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.
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 -
The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
Small things start us in new ways of thinking.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
The writer is all alone.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
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’.
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 -
Making a book is such a big enterprise.
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 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 -
The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
V.S. NAIPAUL