All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.
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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I’m thought to be a tough writer, but I’m really a softie.
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One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
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I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
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The family feuds or the village feuds often had to do with an idea of honor. Perhaps it was a peasant idea; perhaps this idea of honor is especially important to a society without recourse to law or without confidence in law.
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This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true.
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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.
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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 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.
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The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
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The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.
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After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
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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.
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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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Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.
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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