V. S. Naipaul Quotes
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The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
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I've been a free man.
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All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.
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My life is short. I can't listen to banality.
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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 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.
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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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The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
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One must always try to see the truth of a situation - it makes things universal.
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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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Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there.
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I really wasn't equipped to be a writer when I left Oxford. But then I set out to learn. I've always had the highest regard for the craft. I've always felt it was work.
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One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
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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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The time before Islam is a time of blackness: that is part of Muslim theology. History has to serve theology.'
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India is for me a difficult country. It isn’t my home and cannot be my home; and yet I cannot reject it or be indifferent to it; I cannot travel only for the sights. I am at once too close and too far.
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Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand.
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I thought how terrible it would have been if, as could so easily have happened, I had died without knowing this depth of satisfaction, this other person that I had just discovered within myself. It was worth any price, any consequence.
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I'm very content.
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Africa has no future.
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Writing has to support itself.
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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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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.
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It is important not to trust people too much.