If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.
V.S. NAIPAULWhen I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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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 have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.
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Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
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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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If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
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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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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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All cultures have been mingled forever.
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I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
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I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
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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 past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.
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The writer is all alone.
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His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.
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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.
V.S. NAIPAUL