Small things start us in new ways of thinking.
V.S. NAIPAULYou can’t deny what you’ve learned; you can’t deny your travels; you can’t deny the nature of your life.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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I will say I am the sum of my books.
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In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
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Argentine political life is like the life of an ant community or an African forest tribe: full of events, full of crisis and deaths, but life is always cyclical, and the year ends as it begins.
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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 have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
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Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
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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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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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People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.
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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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The writer is all alone.
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I’m my own writer. My material means I’m entirely separate.
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Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.
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I’m thought to be a tough writer, but I’m really a softie.
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I’ve never abandoned the novel.
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The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
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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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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 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 always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people’s lands.
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All cultures have been mingled forever.
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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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One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
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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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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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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