I’m my own writer. My material means I’m entirely separate.
V.S. NAIPAULLife is a helluva thing. You can see trouble coming and you can’t do a damn thing to prevent it coming. You just got to sit and watch and wait.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
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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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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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The writer is all alone.
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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
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I’m thought to be a tough writer, but I’m really a softie.
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I became very interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery.
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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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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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Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
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The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
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People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.
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I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people’s lands.
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But everything of value about me is in my books.
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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 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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The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.
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Life is a helluva thing. You can see trouble coming and you can’t do a damn thing to prevent it coming. You just got to sit and watch and wait.
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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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When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.
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I don’t feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
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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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It is important not to trust people too much.
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My life is short. I can’t listen to banality.
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The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.
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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.
V.S. NAIPAUL