The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
V.S. NAIPAULThis 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.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
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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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All 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.
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Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.
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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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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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All cultures have been mingled forever.
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But everything of value about me is in my books.
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Making a book is such a big enterprise.
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Writing has to support itself.
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An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
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Writers should provoke disagreement.
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That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing – which is never an easy thing to do.
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It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut.
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Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
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I’m my own writer. My material means I’m entirely separate.
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I’ve never abandoned the novel.
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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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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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We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
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Small things start us in new ways of thinking.
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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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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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Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there.
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In England people are very proud of being very stupid.
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If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
V.S. NAIPAUL