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.
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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I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
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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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The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.
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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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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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The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
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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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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 writer is all alone.
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I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
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People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.
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Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
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But everything of value about me is in my books.
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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.
V.S. NAIPAUL