One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
V.S. NAIPAULThe 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.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
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My life is short. I can’t listen to banality.
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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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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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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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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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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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Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn’t fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will – with luck – come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise
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The world is always in movement.
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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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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.
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It is important not to trust people too much.
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A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
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I’m thought to be a tough writer, but I’m really a softie.
V.S. NAIPAUL