V. S. Naipaul Quotes
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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 writer is in the end not his books, but his myth. And that myth is in the keeping of others.
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A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
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Africa is not a fun place, you know. A fun place is somewhere that lifts the spirits, that cossets the senses. I don't think that can be said of the Africa I traveled in.
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In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
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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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The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.
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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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When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.
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I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie.
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The world is always in movement.
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A cat only has itself.
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I went to India and met some people who had been involved in this guerrilla business, middle-class people who were rather vain and foolish. There was no revolutionary grandeur to it. Nothing.
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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.
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Writers should provoke disagreement.
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I have a very small public.
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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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I had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment.
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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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I read many things. I read to fill in my knowledge of the world.
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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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If a man begins writing at thirty, by the time he is fifty or sixty, the bulk of his work has been done. By the time he is eighty, he's got nothing more, you know?
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All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.