Small things start us in new ways of thinking.
V.S. NAIPAULAll the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
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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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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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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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In England people are very proud of being very stupid.
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You need someone to see what you’ve done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what’s gone into it.
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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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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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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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One must always try to see the truth of a situation – it makes things universal.
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People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.
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I’m my own writer. My material means I’m entirely separate.
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The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.
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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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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.
V.S. NAIPAUL