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.
V.S. NAIPAULI’m thought to be a tough writer, but I’m really a softie.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.
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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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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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To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn’t know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.
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Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
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After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
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In England people are very proud of being very stupid.
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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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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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The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
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A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
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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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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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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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I’m my own writer. My material means I’m entirely separate.
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Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
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Small things start us in new ways of thinking.
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The world is always in movement.
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An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
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The family feuds or the village feuds often had to do with an idea of honor. Perhaps it was a peasant idea; perhaps this idea of honor is especially important to a society without recourse to law or without confidence in law.
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I’m thought to be a tough writer, but I’m really a softie.
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Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
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If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.
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I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
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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.
V.S. NAIPAUL