My life is short. I can’t listen to banality.
V.S. NAIPAULThat 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.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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I’m my own writer. My material means I’m entirely separate.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
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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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All cultures have been mingled forever.
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I will say I am the sum of 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 -
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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Life doesn’t have a neat beginning and a tidy end; life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should be all there.
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One must always try to see the truth of a situation – it makes things universal.
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I’ve never abandoned the novel.
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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 -
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.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
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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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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People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.
V.S. NAIPAUL