I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
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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One must always try to see the truth of a situation – it makes things universal.
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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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My life is short. I can’t listen to banality.
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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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As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother’s house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.
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In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
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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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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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All cultures have been mingled forever.
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I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
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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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The writer is all alone.
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To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn’t know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.
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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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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 don’t feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
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If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.
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Writing has to support itself.
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I’m my own writer. My material means I’m entirely separate.
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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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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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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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It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.
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There are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to.
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In England people are very proud of being very stupid.
V.S. NAIPAUL