To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn’t know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.
V.S. NAIPAULThere 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.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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In the beginning, before the arrival of the white men, I had considered myself neutral. I had wanted neither side to win, neither the army nor the rebels. As it turned out, both sides lost.
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After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
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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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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.
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In England people are very proud of being very stupid.
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The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid people; and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and common.
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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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The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.
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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 am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
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I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
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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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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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I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
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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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