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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. "
V. S. Naipaul
Childhood
Life
Well
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" If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris. "
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" 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. "
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View
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Group
" If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead. "
V. S. Naipaul
Writer
Hostility
He
" It is important not to trust people too much. "
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Important
Too Much
Much
" I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands. "
V. S. Naipaul
Come
Always
Who
" 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 came to London. It had become the center of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost. "
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Come
World
Lost
" 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
" 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
" I really wasn't equipped to be a writer when I left Oxford. But then I set out to learn. I've always had the highest regard for the craft. I've always felt it was work. "
V. S. Naipaul
Work
Learn
Craft
" Great writing can be done in biography, history, art. "
V. S. Naipaul
Art
Done
Great
" Writing has to support itself. "
V. S. Naipaul
Itself
Support
Writing
" Africa is not a fun place, you know. A fun place is somewhere that lifts the spirits, that cossets the senses. I don't think that can be said of the Africa I traveled in. "
V. S. Naipaul
Know
You
Think
" 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
" Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background. "
V. S. Naipaul
Write
Always
Background
" 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 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
" But everything of value about me is in my books. "
V. S. Naipaul
Books
About
Me
" In England people are very proud of being very stupid. "
V. S. Naipaul
Stupid
Proud
People
" Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society. "
V. S. Naipaul
Society
Simple
Complex
" 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
" 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. "
V. S. Naipaul
Thought
Roots
Questions
" What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude. "
V. S. Naipaul
Suppose
Attitude
Past
" Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand. "
V. S. Naipaul
Trying
Act
Judgment
" All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right. "
V. S. Naipaul
Father
Things
Right
" 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 world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing. "
V. S. Naipaul
World
Darkness
Kind
" 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. "
V. S. Naipaul
Business
People
Some People
" 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
" This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true. "
V. S. Naipaul
Unusual
True
People