If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.
V.S. NAIPAULI know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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My life is short. I can’t listen to banality.
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It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That’s where the mischief starts. That’s where everything starts unravelling.
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The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.
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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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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 -
The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
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
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In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
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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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I still think it’s really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.
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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 -
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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An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
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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