The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
V.S. NAIPAULHis ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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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.
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Writers should provoke disagreement.
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After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
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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.
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The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
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I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
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I’m thought to be a tough writer, but I’m really a softie.
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The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.
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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.
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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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I will say I am the sum of my books.
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I don’t feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
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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.
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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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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. NAIPAUL