In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
V.S. NAIPAULSome 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.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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Making a book is such a big enterprise.
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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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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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I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
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Writers should provoke disagreement.
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One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
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It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That’s where the mischief starts. That’s where everything starts unravelling.
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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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The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.
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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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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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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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The family feuds or the village feuds often had to do with an idea of honor. Perhaps it was a peasant idea; perhaps this idea of honor is especially important to a society without recourse to law or without confidence in law.
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But everything of value about me is in my books.
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After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
V.S. NAIPAUL






