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. 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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It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.
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 -
Most 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.
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If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
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The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.
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I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
I became very interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
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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Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
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One isn’t born one’s self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people’s ideas – and you have to work through it all.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
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 -
That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing – which is never an easy thing to do.
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Small things start us in new ways of thinking.
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I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.
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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