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" I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time. "
V. S. Naipaul
Letting
You
Time
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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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Father
Beyond
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" I have a very small public. "
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Very
Public
Small
" A cat only has itself. "
V. S. Naipaul
Cat
Only
Itself
" 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
" I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs. "
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Seeing
End
Eyes
" I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness. "
V. S. Naipaul
Think
Still
Mine
" If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead. "
V. S. Naipaul
Writer
Hostility
He
" 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. "
V. S. Naipaul
Men
Cinema
Done
" 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. "
V. S. Naipaul
Own
Live
Kind
" 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. "
V. S. Naipaul
Come
World
Lost
" 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
" A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying. "
V. S. Naipaul
Over
Dying
Said
" 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. "
V. S. Naipaul
Writing
Details
Life
" I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people. "
V. S. Naipaul
Feel
Speak
People
" 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. "
V. S. Naipaul
Feel
Career
Said
" The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it. "
V. S. Naipaul
Place
Become
Men
" You need someone to see what you've done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what's gone into it. "
V. S. Naipaul
Need
You
Appreciate
" Africa has no future. "
V. S. Naipaul
Future
No Future
Africa
" 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
" Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will - with luck - come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise. "
V. S. Naipaul
Luck
I Am
Moment
" An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally. "
V. S. Naipaul
Autobiography
Facts
Never
" I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world. "
V. S. Naipaul
Place
World
Young
" Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives. "
V. S. Naipaul
Books
Tend
Many
" I'm very content. "
V. S. Naipaul
Content
Very
" 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
" I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading. "
V. S. Naipaul
I Am
People
Kind
" If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris. "
V. S. Naipaul
You
Intellectual
Go
" Making a book is such a big enterprise. "
V. S. Naipaul
Making
Enterprise
Big
" Writers should provoke disagreement. "
V. S. Naipaul
Writers
Should
Disagreement
" Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand. "
V. S. Naipaul
Kicked
Thing
Only