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
V.S. NAIPAULEach book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother’s house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.
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Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
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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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I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
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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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One must always try to see the truth of a situation – it makes things universal.
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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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If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
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Small things start us in new ways of thinking.
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In England people are very proud of being very stupid.
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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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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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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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If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
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It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That’s where the mischief starts. That’s where everything starts unravelling.
V.S. NAIPAUL