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After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.

V.S. Naipaul

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
To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn’t know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Book Day Myself Past Writing
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.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Gold Goodness Help Slave Time
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
Writers should provoke disagreement.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Agreement Argument 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
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
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
I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.
V.S. NAIPAUL

End Eyes Need People See World
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.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Beginning Lost Man Myself Side White Win
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
My life is short. I can’t listen to banality.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Life Listening Myself
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. NAIPAUL

Establishment Greatness Imitation Man Mindset Movie Original Story Time
I still think it’s really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Myself Quality Quite Reading Thinking Wonderful
It’s very attractive to people to be a victim. Instead of having to think out the whole situation, about history and your group and what you are doing. If you begin from the point of view of being a victim, you’ve got it half-made. I mean intellectually.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Attraction Beginning Group History Intellectual Myself People Victim
If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Oppression Sit Talk Writing

After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.

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After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.

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