I’m my own writer. My material means I’m entirely separate.
V.S. NAIPAULTo this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn’t know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
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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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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.
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Making a book is such a big enterprise.
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My life is short. I can’t listen to banality.
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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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And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of victory fills a moment and then is over.
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It is important not to trust people too much.
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The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
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If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
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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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I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.
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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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Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
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Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
V.S. NAIPAUL