V. S. Naipaul Quotes
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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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Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
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In Trinidad, where as new arrivals we were a disadvantaged community, that excluding idea was a kind of protection; it enabled us - for the time being, and only for the time being - to live in our own way and according to our own rules, to live in our own fading India.
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One is made by all the things around one. There are many things that have made one. For a writer to go around looking for things that have made him is asking for trouble. It's like giving a character to yourself. Can't do it. Can't do it. These things are just there. Is that enough?
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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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In England people are very proud of being very stupid.
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I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands.
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I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
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Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.
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Making a book is such a big enterprise.
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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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Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it's complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he's able to keep processing that as well.
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But everything of value about me is in my books.
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I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
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I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.
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I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
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To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter.'
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If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms, break the forms.
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Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
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To be a writer you have to be out in the world, you have to risk yourself in the world, you have to be immersed in the world, you have to go out looking for it. This becomes harder as you get older because there's less energy, the days are shorter for older people and it's not so easy to go out and immerse oneself in the world outside.
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I could scarcely bear to look at her eyes. They promised such intimacies.
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The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.
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To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn't know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.
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I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.