Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
V.S. NAIPAULMy life is short. I can’t listen to banality.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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I’m my own writer. My material means I’m entirely separate.
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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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One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
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Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
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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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But everything of value about me is in my books.
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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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There are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to.
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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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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 know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
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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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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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One must always try to see the truth of a situation – it makes things universal.
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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.
V.S. NAIPAUL