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" Writers should provoke disagreement. "
V. S. Naipaul
Writers
Should
Disagreement
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" Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society. "
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" Great writing can be done in biography, history, art. "
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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. "
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" If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead. "
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" I've never abandoned the novel. "
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" What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude. "
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" If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate. "
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" 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. "
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" I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world. "
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" My life is short. I can't listen to banality. "
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" I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea. "
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" Writing has to support itself. "
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" I read many things. I read to fill in my knowledge of the world. "
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" Nothing was made in Trinidad. "
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" Making a book is such a big enterprise. "
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" 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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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" In England people are very proud of being very stupid. "
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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. "
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