In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
V.S. NAIPAULIf ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
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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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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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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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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.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
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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Making a book is such a big enterprise.
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I still think it’s really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.
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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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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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It has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say ‘my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn’t matter’.
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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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I don’t feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
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I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people’s lands.
V.S. NAIPAUL