The writer is all alone.
V.S. NAIPAULAll cultures have been mingled forever.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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My life is short. I can’t listen to banality.
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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’m thought to be a tough writer, but I’m really a softie.
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I will say I am the sum of my books.
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Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
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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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Writers should provoke disagreement.
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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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I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
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Small things start us in new ways of thinking.
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Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
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The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.
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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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Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
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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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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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Writing has to support itself.
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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’s very attractive to people to be a victim. Instead of having to think out the whole situation, about history and your group and what you are doing. If you begin from the point of view of being a victim, you’ve got it half-made. I mean intellectually.
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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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I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
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One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
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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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Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
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If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.
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If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
V.S. NAIPAUL