V. S. Naipaul Quotes
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My life is short. I can't listen to banality.
V. S. Naipaul -
Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand.
V. S. Naipaul
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Africa has no future.
V. S. Naipaul -
I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.
V. S. Naipaul -
In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
V. S. Naipaul -
Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
V. S. Naipaul -
The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.
V. S. Naipaul -
I read many things. I read to fill in my knowledge of the world.
V. S. Naipaul
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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.
V. S. Naipaul -
I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.
V. S. Naipaul -
I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
V. S. Naipaul -
If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.
V. S. Naipaul -
It is important not to trust people too much.
V. S. Naipaul -
If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
V. S. Naipaul
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I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world.
V. S. Naipaul -
The writer is all alone.
V. S. Naipaul -
The longer I live the more convinced I become that one of the greatest honors we can confer on other people is to see them as they are, to recognize not only that they exist, but that they exist in specific ways and have specific realities.
V. S. Naipaul -
I've never abandoned the novel.
V. S. Naipaul -
Writing has to support itself.
V. S. Naipaul -
What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material. And the fictional form was going to force you to do things with the material, to dramatize it in a certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to explore the world, the other world, the world that one didn't know fully.
V. S. Naipaul
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It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut.
V. S. Naipaul -
A cat only has itself.
V. S. Naipaul -
In England I am not English, in India I am not Indian. I am chained to the 1,000 square miles that is Trinidad; but I will evade that fate yet.
V. S. Naipaul -
The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
V. S. Naipaul