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
Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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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.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
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 -
Writers should provoke disagreement.
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The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.
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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.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
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 -
It is important not to trust people too much.
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The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves.
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The writer is all alone.
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The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.
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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.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
V.S. NAIPAUL