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.
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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When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.
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The writer is all alone.
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Making a book is such a big enterprise.
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Small things start us in new ways of thinking.
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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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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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I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.
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And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of victory fills a moment and then is over.
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People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.
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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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I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people’s lands.
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Writers should provoke disagreement.
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One must always try to see the truth of a situation – it makes things universal.
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The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
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If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
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I will say I am the sum of my books.
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An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
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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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Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
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Writing has to support itself.
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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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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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The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.
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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.
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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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I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.
V.S. NAIPAUL