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" A cat only has itself. "
V. S. Naipaul
Cat
Only
Itself
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" What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude. "
V. S. Naipaul
Suppose
Attitude
Past
" My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world. "
V. S. Naipaul
Grief
Writing
Dirty
" 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. "
V. S. Naipaul
Children
Child
World
" If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms, break the forms. "
V. S. Naipaul
Ready
Serious
Want
" It's very attractive to people to be a victim. Instead of having to think out the whole situation, about history and your group and what you are doing... if you begin from the point of view of being a victim, you've got it half-made. I mean intellectually. "
V. S. Naipaul
View
History
Group
" I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading. "
V. S. Naipaul
I Am
People
Kind
" I'm very content. "
V. S. Naipaul
Content
Very
" 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. "
V. S. Naipaul
See
More
Live
" 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. "
V. S. Naipaul
Write
Sometimes
People
" Great writing can be done in biography, history, art. "
V. S. Naipaul
Art
Done
Great
" 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. "
V. S. Naipaul
Writing
World
Thought
" 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? "
V. S. Naipaul
Yourself
Giving
Go
" We made no inquiries about India or about the families people had left behind. When our ways of thinking had changed, and we wished to know, it was too late. I know nothing of the people on my father's side; I know only that some of them came from Nepal. "
V. S. Naipaul
Know
Late
Thinking
" I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs. "
V. S. Naipaul
Seeing
End
Eyes
" One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria. "
V. S. Naipaul
Comedy
Moment
Deepest
" 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. "
V. S. Naipaul
I Am
Judging
Look
" 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. "
V. S. Naipaul
Man
Friends
Student
" The writer is all alone. "
V. S. Naipaul
Alone
Writer
" I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. "
V. S. Naipaul
Writing
Within
Two
" I've been a free man. "
V. S. Naipaul
Been
Free Man
Free
" One must always try to see the truth of a situation - it makes things universal. "
V. S. Naipaul
See
Truth
Try
" Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe. "
V. S. Naipaul
House
Place
Child
" 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? "
V. S. Naipaul
Work
Know
Time
" 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. "
V. S. Naipaul
See
Atheist
Become
" In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon. "
V. S. Naipaul
Become
Reputation
Way
" I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people. "
V. S. Naipaul
Feel
Speak
People
" 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. "
V. S. Naipaul
You
Talk
Name
" 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. "
V. S. Naipaul
Self
Expectations
Ideas
" 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. "
V. S. Naipaul
Looking
Energy
People
" It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut. "
V. S. Naipaul
Paths
Good
Heart