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" 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

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" I have a very small public. "

" In England people are very proud of being very stupid. "

" You need someone to see what you've done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what's gone into it. "

" 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? "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I'm very content. "

V. S. Naipaul

Content

Very

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" I've never abandoned the novel. "

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

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

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

" A cat only has itself. "

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background. "

" It is important not to trust people too much. "

" I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time. "

" 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. "

" The world is always in movement. "

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

" My life is short. I can't listen to banality. "