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.
V.S. NAIPAULThe writer is all alone.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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My life is short. I can’t listen to banality.
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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
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In England people are very proud of being very stupid.
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After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
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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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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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I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
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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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We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
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An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
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And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of victory fills a moment and then is over.
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Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
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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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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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A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
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People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.
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It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.
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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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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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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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If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
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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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One must always try to see the truth of a situation – it makes things universal.
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I’m thought to be a tough writer, but I’m really a softie.
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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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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.
V.S. NAIPAUL