One must always try to see the truth of a situation – it makes things universal.
V.S. NAIPAULIt’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.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
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If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
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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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If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.
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Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.
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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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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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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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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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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
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Writing has to support itself.
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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.
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The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.
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In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
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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.
V.S. NAIPAUL