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.
V.S. NAIPAULI’m my own writer. My material means I’m entirely separate.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
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All cultures have been mingled forever.
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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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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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Writers should provoke disagreement.
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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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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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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 past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.
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Making a book is such a big enterprise.
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All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.
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I’m thought to be a tough writer, but I’m really a softie.
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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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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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One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
V.S. NAIPAUL