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.
V.S. NAIPAULMany writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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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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A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
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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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After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
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I’ve never abandoned the novel.
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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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I will say I am the sum of my books.
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I’m my own writer. My material means I’m entirely separate.
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If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
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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.
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In the beginning, before the arrival of the white men, I had considered myself neutral. I had wanted neither side to win, neither the army nor the rebels. As it turned out, both sides lost.
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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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Writers should provoke disagreement.
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The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid people; and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and common.
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All cultures have been mingled forever.
V.S. NAIPAUL