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.
V.S. NAIPAULYou need someone to see what you’ve done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what’s gone into it.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That’s where the mischief starts. That’s where everything starts unravelling.
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But everything of value about me is in my books.
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There are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to.
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It is important not to trust people too much.
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A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
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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 a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.
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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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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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The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.
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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.
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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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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 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’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.
V.S. NAIPAUL