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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. "
V. S. Naipaul
Country
You
Aggression
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" I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred. "
V. S. Naipaul
Father
Beyond
Mother
" 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
" My life is short. I can't listen to banality. "
V. S. Naipaul
Short
Life
My Life
" Writers should provoke disagreement. "
V. S. Naipaul
Writers
Should
Disagreement
" 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
" Great writing can be done in biography, history, art. "
V. S. Naipaul
Art
Done
Great
" 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
" I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea. "
V. S. Naipaul
Political
Always
Intuition
" I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie. "
V. S. Naipaul
Writer
Thought
Tough
" An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally. "
V. S. Naipaul
Autobiography
Facts
Never
" Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives. "
V. S. Naipaul
Books
Tend
Many
" 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
" In England I am not English, in India I am not Indian. I am chained to the 1,000 square miles that is Trinidad; but I will evade that fate yet. "
V. S. Naipaul
Miles
Will
Fate
" I read many things. I read to fill in my knowledge of the world. "
V. S. Naipaul
Things
Many
World
" 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.' "
V. S. Naipaul
You
Culture
History
" A cat only has itself. "
V. S. Naipaul
Cat
Only
Itself
" When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day. "
V. S. Naipaul
Strength
Day
Me
" Africa has no future. "
V. S. Naipaul
Future
No Future
Africa
" 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
" I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading. "
V. S. Naipaul
I Am
People
Kind
" If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing. "
V. S. Naipaul
Talk
Writing
Oppression
" A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying. "
V. S. Naipaul
Over
Dying
Said
" Nothing was made in Trinidad. "
V. S. Naipaul
Nothing
Made
" One must always try to see the truth of a situation - it makes things universal. "
V. S. Naipaul
See
Truth
Try
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
V. S. Naipaul
Editor
She
Good
" 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
" 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
" 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