His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.
V.S. NAIPAULI 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.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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One must always try to see the truth of a situation – it makes things universal.
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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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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 was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut.
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The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.
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Making a book is such a big enterprise.
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The 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.
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Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn’t fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will – with luck – come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise
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All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.
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This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true.
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I’m my own writer. My material means I’m entirely separate.
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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.
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The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
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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.
V.S. NAIPAUL