When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.
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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The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
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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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If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
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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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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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His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.
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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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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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We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
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It is important not to trust people too much.
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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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Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
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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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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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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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You can’t deny what you’ve learned; you can’t deny your travels; you can’t deny the nature of your life.
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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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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.
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If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
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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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I’m thought to be a tough writer, but I’m really a softie.
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I’ve never abandoned the novel.
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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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Small things start us in new ways of thinking.
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If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don’t express your disregard for the essence of the culture. It’s a form of aggression.
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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. NAIPAUL