V. S. Naipaul Quotes
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My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.
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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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Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand.
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I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
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One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
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In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
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I often wonder what would have happened to me if I hadn't made that decision. I suppose I would have sunk. I suppose I would have found some kind of hole and tried to hide or pass. After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities. I would have hidden in my hole and been crippled by my sentimentality, doing what I was doing, and doing it well, but always looking for the wailing wall. And I would never have seen the world as the rich place that it is. You wouldn't have seen me here in Africa, doing what I do.
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But everything of value about me is in my books.
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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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Making a book is such a big enterprise.
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The writer is all alone.
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We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
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I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
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One must always try to see the truth of a situation - it makes things universal.
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Out of its squalor and human decay, its eruptions of butchery, India produced so many people of grace and beauty, ruled by elaborate courtesy. Producing too much life, it denied the value of life; yet it permitted a unique human development to so many. Nowhere were people so heightened, rounded and individualistic; nowhere did they offer themselves so fully and with such assurance. To know Indians was to take a delight in people as people; every encounter was an adventure. I did not want India to sink [out of my memory]; the mere thought was painful.
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Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will - with luck - come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise
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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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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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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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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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I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
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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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Writing has to support itself.
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I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world.
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If it was Europe that gave us on the coast some idea of our history, it was Europe, I feel, that also introduced us to the lie.
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If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.
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I came to London. It had become the center of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost.
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If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
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I will say I am the sum of my books.
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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
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