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" 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. "

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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.' "

V. S. Naipaul

You

Culture

History

" 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. "

" I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years. "

" 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. "

" The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness. "

" 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. "

" One must always try to see the truth of a situation - it makes things universal. "

" I became very interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery. "

" The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate. "

" 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

Live

" I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands. "

" If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account. "

" What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude. "

" I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people. "

" I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand. "

" I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs. "

" I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading. "

" I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea. "

" 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. "

" Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand. "

" I went to India and met some people who had been involved in this guerrilla business, middle-class people who were rather vain and foolish. There was no revolutionary grandeur to it. Nothing. "

" Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe. "

" But everything of value about me is in my books. "

V. S. Naipaul

Books

About

" 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. "

" I'm very content. "

V. S. Naipaul

Content

Very

" 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. "

" 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. "