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.
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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I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
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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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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
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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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If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
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Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there.
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Writing has to support itself.
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Small things start us in new ways of thinking.
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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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Home is, I suppose just a child’s idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.
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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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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.
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After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
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Writers should provoke disagreement.
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The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
V.S. NAIPAUL