If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
V.S. NAIPAULI 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.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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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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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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All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.
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If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
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All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.
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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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But everything of value about me is in my books.
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I’m thought to be a tough writer, but I’m really a softie.
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The writer is all alone.
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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 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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After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
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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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Argentine political life is like the life of an ant community or an African forest tribe: full of events, full of crisis and deaths, but life is always cyclical, and the year ends as it begins.
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Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
V.S. NAIPAUL