Writers should provoke disagreement.
V.S. NAIPAULJudgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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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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Small things start us in new ways of thinking.
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The first 50 years of the cinema were absolutely great years. Original minds were at work establishing the ways to tell a story. And what is happening now is a copying, a pastiche-ing of what was done by great men.
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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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Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
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I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.
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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 ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
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One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
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You can’t deny what you’ve learned; you can’t deny your travels; you can’t deny the nature of your life.
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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.
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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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Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there.
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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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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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A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
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The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.
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If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don’t express your disregard for the essence of the culture. It’s a form of aggression.
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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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Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it’s complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he’s able to keep processing that as well.
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I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
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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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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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It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That’s where the mischief starts. That’s where everything starts unravelling.
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After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
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In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
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