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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.

V.S. Naipaul

One must always try to see the truth of a situation – it makes things universal.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Oneself Situation Truth Universe
I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Ancestor Family Father Mom Myself
Home is, I suppose just a child’s idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Children Feeling Home Ideas Night Place Safety
Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Act Judgement Try Understand Wisdom
Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Fiction Growth Intuition
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.
V.S. NAIPAUL

City Goodness Heart Lost Path Place Separate Unknown
You can’t deny what you’ve learned; you can’t deny your travels; you can’t deny the nature of your life.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Learning Life Nature Travel Yourself
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.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Beginning End Life Yourself
An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Fact Fiction Lying Writing
Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Book End Live Writing
Writers should provoke disagreement.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Agreement Argument Writing
I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people’s lands.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Born Hands Home Myself People Search
All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Father Reading Right Story
One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Comedy Deep Moments Writing
The world is always in movement.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Change Movement One Liner World
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.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Detail Friendship Inspirational Life Mystery Writing
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.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Hell Life Patience Prevent Trouble Wait Yourself
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’.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Affect Calm Destroy Existence History Myself Past People
I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Feeling People Time Yourself
I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Kind Myself People Thinking Writing
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.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Beginning Community Death End Life Myself Politics
His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Himself Ignorance Reading
It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Answer Philosophy Right Wrong
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. NAIPAUL

Confidence Family Fight Ideas Important Law Respect Society
We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Inheritance Ourselves Stranger Understand
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

Beginning Business Intuition Myself Reason
Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it’s complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he’s able to keep processing that as well.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Childhood Deal Experience Himself Kind Life Writing

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 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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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