It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That’s where the mischief starts. That’s where everything starts unravelling.
V.S. NAIPAULI have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.
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If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
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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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The first 50 years of the cinema were absolutely great years. Original minds were at work establishing the ways to tell a story. And what is happening now is a copying, a pastiche-ing of what was done by great men.
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In England people are very proud of being very stupid.
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It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
I don’t feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
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In the beginning, before the arrival of the white men, I had considered myself neutral. I had wanted neither side to win, neither the army nor the rebels. As it turned out, both sides lost.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
It is important not to trust people too much.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
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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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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If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don’t express your disregard for the essence of the culture. It’s a form of aggression.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
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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A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
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I will say I am the sum of my books.
V.S. NAIPAUL