We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
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 world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.
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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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One must always try to see the truth of a situation – it makes things universal.
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I will say I am the sum of my books.
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Small things start us in new ways of thinking.
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That 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.
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If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.
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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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Making a book is such a big enterprise.
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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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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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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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I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
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Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
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It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.
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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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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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Whatever 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
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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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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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Life is a helluva thing. You can see trouble coming and you can’t do a damn thing to prevent it coming. You just got to sit and watch and wait.
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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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If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
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After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
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I’m thought to be a tough writer, but I’m really a softie.
V.S. NAIPAUL