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.
V.S. NAIPAULLife doesn’t have a neat beginning and a tidy end; life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should be all there.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
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The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
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I’m thought to be a tough writer, but I’m really a softie.
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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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It is important not to trust people too much.
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If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
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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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Home is, I suppose just a child’s idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.
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The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
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A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
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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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I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.
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People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.
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All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.
V.S. NAIPAUL