V. S. Naipaul Quotes
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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
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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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I have a very small public.
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Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
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What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.
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If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
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How can you be an atheist and have an ideology to go with it? To be an atheist is to be free of some areas of belief. I don't see how that can become an ideology.
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At school I had only admirers; I had no friends.
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The writer is all alone.
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There are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to.
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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.
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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.
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This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true.
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Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.
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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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My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.
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You need someone to see what you've done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what's gone into it.
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But everything of value about me is in my books.
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My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh.
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If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.
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There are certain things that are too painful for people to even write about sometimes, and there are certain things that are too hard to read about again.
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The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.
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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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Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.