It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That’s where the mischief starts. That’s where everything starts unravelling.
V.S. NAIPAULHis ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
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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One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
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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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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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We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
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Small things start us in new ways of thinking.
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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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One must always try to see the truth of a situation – it makes things universal.
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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
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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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I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.
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One isn’t born one’s self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people’s ideas – and you have to work through it all.
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You need someone to see what you’ve done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what’s gone into it.
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A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
V.S. NAIPAUL