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.
V.S. NAIPAULThe 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.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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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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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
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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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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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If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.
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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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Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
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His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.
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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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The writer is all alone.
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I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.
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The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.
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The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
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One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
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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.
V.S. NAIPAUL