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.
V.S. NAIPAULIgnorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.
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The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
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I will say I am the sum of my books.
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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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I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
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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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People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.
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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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His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.
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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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I don’t feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
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If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don’t express your disregard for the essence of the culture. It’s a form of aggression.
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Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
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The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
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It is important not to trust people too much.
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All cultures have been mingled forever.
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One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
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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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Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
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After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
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Small things start us in new ways of thinking.
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If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.
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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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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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If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
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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