My life is short. I can’t listen to banality.
V.S. NAIPAULIn England people are very proud of being very stupid.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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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’m my own writer. My material means I’m entirely separate.
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The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
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Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
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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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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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I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
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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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I will say I am the sum of my books.
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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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The world is always in movement.
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I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.
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The 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.
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I’ve never abandoned the novel.
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We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
V.S. NAIPAUL