We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
V.S. NAIPAULAll the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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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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An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
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I don’t feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
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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.
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And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of victory fills a moment and then is over.
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It’s very attractive to people to be a victim. Instead of having to think out the whole situation, about history and your group and what you are doing. If you begin from the point of view of being a victim, you’ve got it half-made. I mean intellectually.
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Life 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.
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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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It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.
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Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
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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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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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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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Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
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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.
V.S. NAIPAUL