V. S. Naipaul Quotes
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My life is short. I can't listen to banality.
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Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand.
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Africa has no future.
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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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In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
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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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I read many things. I read to fill in my knowledge of the world.
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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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Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
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Writing has to support itself.
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The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.
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If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don't express your disregard for the essence of the culture. It's a form of aggression.
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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.
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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
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It is important not to trust people too much.
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If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.
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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've been a free man.
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The writer is all alone.
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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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I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie.
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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.
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A cat only has itself.
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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.