After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
V.S. NAIPAULMen 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.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
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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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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 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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The world is always in movement.
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But everything of value about me is in my books.
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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 will say I am the sum of my books.
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One must always try to see the truth of a situation – it makes things universal.
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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 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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All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.
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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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All cultures have been mingled forever.
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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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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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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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Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
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The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
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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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Home is, I suppose just a child’s idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.
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If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.
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In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
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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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All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.
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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.
V.S. NAIPAUL