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.
V.S. NAIPAULHis ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people’s lands.
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All cultures have been mingled forever.
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I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.
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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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It has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say ‘my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn’t matter’.
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The world is always in movement.
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I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.
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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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After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
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Writing has to support itself.
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When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.
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That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing – which is never an easy thing to do.
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Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
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A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
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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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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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I will say I am the sum of my books.
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One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
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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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If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
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Argentine political life is like the life of an ant community or an African forest tribe: full of events, full of crisis and deaths, but life is always cyclical, and the year ends as it begins.
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The writer is all alone.
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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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I’m my own writer. My material means I’m entirely separate.
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One must always try to see the truth of a situation – it makes things universal.
V.S. NAIPAUL