I’m my own writer. My material means I’m entirely separate.
V.S. NAIPAULMost 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.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.
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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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I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
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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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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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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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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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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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After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
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In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
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The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.
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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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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.
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The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
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Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn’t fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will – with luck – come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise
V.S. NAIPAUL