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. 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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There are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to.
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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.
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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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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 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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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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Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
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The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.
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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
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One must always try to see the truth of a situation – it makes things universal.
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One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
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But everything of value about me is in my books.
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His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.
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Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
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The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.
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All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.
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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.
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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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Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
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My life is short. I can’t listen to banality.
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Small things start us in new ways of thinking.
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We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
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The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
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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 know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
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Home is, I suppose just a child’s idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.
V.S. NAIPAUL