It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.
V.S. NAIPAULWhatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn’t fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will – with luck – come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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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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Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
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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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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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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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I don’t feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
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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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There are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to.
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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 reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.
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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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All cultures have been mingled forever.
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The first 50 years of the cinema were absolutely great years. Original minds were at work establishing the ways to tell a story. And what is happening now is a copying, a pastiche-ing of what was done by great men.
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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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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