Writers should provoke disagreement.
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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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.
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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 will say I am the sum of my books.
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Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.
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A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
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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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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
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I don’t feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
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Writing has to support itself.
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I’ve never abandoned the novel.
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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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As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother’s house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.
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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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I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.
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It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.
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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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The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
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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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If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
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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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All cultures have been mingled forever.
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Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
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If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
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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.
V.S. NAIPAUL