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I’m thought to be a tough writer, but I’m really a softie.

V.S. Naipaul

I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.
V.S. NAIPAUL

End Eyes Need People See World
After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Ideas Ourselves Possible
Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Book End Live Writing
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.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Beyond Children Home Myself World
You can’t deny what you’ve learned; you can’t deny your travels; you can’t deny the nature of your life.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Learning Life Nature Travel Yourself
And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of victory fills a moment and then is over.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Death Man Moments Myself Sadness Sorrow Strange Victory
If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Oppression Sit Talk Writing
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’.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Affect Calm Destroy Existence History Myself Past People
His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Himself Ignorance Reading
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.
V.S. NAIPAUL

City Goodness Heart Lost Path Place Separate Unknown
I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Kind Myself People Thinking Writing
Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Fiction Growth Intuition
The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Man Place World Worth
The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Death Kill Past See
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. NAIPAUL

Born Expectation Ideas People Work Yourself
A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Civilization Conquer Death World

I’m thought to be a tough writer, but I’m really a softie.

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I’m thought to be a tough writer, but I’m really a softie.

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