One must always try to see the truth of a situation – it makes things universal.
V.S. NAIPAULMy life is short. I can’t listen to banality.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.
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In the beginning, before the arrival of the white men, I had considered myself neutral. I had wanted neither side to win, neither the army nor the rebels. As it turned out, both sides lost.
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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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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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Small things start us in new ways of thinking.
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It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.
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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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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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The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.
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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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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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The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
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It is important not to trust people too much.
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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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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.
V.S. NAIPAUL