Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.
V.S. NAIPAULIn a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.
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Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
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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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Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
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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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The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.
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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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An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
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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.
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The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
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The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
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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.
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All cultures have been mingled forever.
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I will say I am the sum of my books.
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My life is short. I can’t listen to banality.
V.S. NAIPAUL