The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.
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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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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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
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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.
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You need someone to see what you’ve done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what’s gone into it.
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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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You can’t deny what you’ve learned; you can’t deny your travels; you can’t deny the nature of your life.
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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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The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
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I don’t feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
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Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
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People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.
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I’m thought to be a tough writer, but I’m really a softie.
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Writing has to support itself.
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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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The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.
V.S. NAIPAUL