I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
V.S. NAIPAULMaking a book is such a big enterprise.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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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.
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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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It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.
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One must always try to see the truth of a situation – it makes things universal.
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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
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If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
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Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
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One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
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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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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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In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
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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 still think it’s really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.
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His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.
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The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
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Making a book is such a big enterprise.
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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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The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.
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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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But everything of value about me is in my books.
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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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I’ve never abandoned the novel.
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It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That’s where the mischief starts. That’s where everything starts unravelling.
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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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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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All cultures have been mingled forever.
V.S. NAIPAUL