The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
V.S. NAIPAULArgentine 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.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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Writing has to support itself.
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It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.
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Small things start us in new ways of thinking.
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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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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 could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.
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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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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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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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The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid people; and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and common.
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In the beginning, before the arrival of the white men, I had considered myself neutral. I had wanted neither side to win, neither the army nor the rebels. As it turned out, both sides lost.
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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.
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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 profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
V.S. NAIPAUL