Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.
V.S. NAIPAULIn England people are very proud of being very stupid.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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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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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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Small things start us in new ways of thinking.
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I’m thought to be a tough writer, but I’m really a softie.
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I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.
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You can’t deny what you’ve learned; you can’t deny your travels; you can’t deny the nature of your life.
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All cultures have been mingled forever.
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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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People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.
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I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
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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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I still think it’s really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.
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Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
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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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An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
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It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.
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The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid people; and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and common.
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The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves.
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A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
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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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Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
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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 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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One 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.
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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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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