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.
V.S. NAIPAULThe only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
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I don’t feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
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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.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
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’.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
My life is short. I can’t listen to banality.
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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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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 -
I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
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.
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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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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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People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.
V.S. NAIPAUL