Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
V.S. NAIPAULSmall things start us in new ways of thinking.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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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.
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If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
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The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
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I will say I am the sum of my books.
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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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People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.
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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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It is important not to trust people too much.
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I’m my own writer. My material means I’m entirely separate.
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The family feuds or the village feuds often had to do with an idea of honor. Perhaps it was a peasant idea; perhaps this idea of honor is especially important to a society without recourse to law or without confidence in law.
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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 only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
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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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The writer is all alone.
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His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.
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I still think it’s really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.
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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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Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
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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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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 could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.
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I don’t feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
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In England people are very proud of being very stupid.
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Making a book is such a big enterprise.
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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
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The first 50 years of the cinema were absolutely great years. Original minds were at work establishing the ways to tell a story. And what is happening now is a copying, a pastiche-ing of what was done by great men.
V.S. NAIPAUL