#on

A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying. ↗

— V. S. Naipaul

#civilization #dying #over #said #taken

An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally. ↗

— V. S. Naipaul

#distort #facts #fiction #lies #never

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

#beyond #child #children #come #grandmother

Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others. ↗

— V. S. Naipaul

#been #before #book #career #case

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

#became #discovery #i #interested #islamic

People who have what they want are fond of telling people who haven't what they want that they really don't want it. ↗

— Ogden Nash

#haven #people #really #telling #want

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. ↗

— V. S. Naipaul

#find #fully #i #idea #intuition

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

— V. S. Naipaul

#beyond #blurred #cannot #father #go

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

#mine #quality #quite #read #really

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 #foolish #grandeur #guerrilla #had