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.
V.S. NAIPAULIf a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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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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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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I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
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I’m thought to be a tough writer, but I’m really a softie.
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I’ve never abandoned the novel.
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I’m my own writer. My material means I’m entirely separate.
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It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.
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The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
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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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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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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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Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
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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 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 the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.
V.S. NAIPAUL