S. Naipaul
S. Naipaul
firsts film hours
To read a newspaper for the first time is like coming into a film that has been on for an hour. Newspapers are like serials. To understand them you have to take knowledge to them; the knowledge that serves best is the knowledge provided by the newspaper itself.
book values
But everything of value about me is in my books.
lying facts deceit
An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
ideas years intuition
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.
ideas possibility
After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
mean thinking views
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.
sports fall wings
What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And- though played out forms can throw up miraculous sports like The Importance of Being Earnest or Decline and Fall- what is good is always what is new, in both form and content. What is good forgets whatever models it might have had, and is unexpected; we have to catch it on the wing.
writing hysteria comedy
One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
book
I will say I am the sum of my books.
children home night
Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.
movement world
The world is always in movement.
thinking world invasion
I think when you see so many Hindu temples of the 10th century or earlier disfigured, defaced, you realise that something terrible happened. I feel the civilisation of that closed world was mortally wounded by those invasions the old world is destroyed. That has to be understood. Ancient Hindu India was destroyed.
lying
The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
writing two pieces
I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.