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.
V.S. NAIPAULOne 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.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
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People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.
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I’ve never abandoned the novel.
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Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
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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 writer is all alone.
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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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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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Writers should provoke disagreement.
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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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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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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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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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If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
V.S. NAIPAUL