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. NAIPAULIgnorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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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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Home is, I suppose just a child’s idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.
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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.
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I will say I am the sum of my books.
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Making a book is such a big enterprise.
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Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
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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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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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It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.
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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 am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
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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.
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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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All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.
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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.
V.S. NAIPAUL