The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
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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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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I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.
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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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After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
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The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
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Small things start us in new ways of thinking.
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One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
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You need someone to see what you’ve done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what’s gone into it.
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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.
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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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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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We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
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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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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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I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
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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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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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Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
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Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.
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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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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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The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
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The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.
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It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.
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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.
V.S. NAIPAUL