S. Naipaul
S. Naipaul
tough
I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie.
all-alone
The writer is all alone.
pain character passion
How could people like these, without words to put to their emotions and passions, manage? They could, at best, only suffer dumbly. Their pains and humiliations would work themselves out in their characters alone: like evil spirits possessing a body, so that the body itself might appear innocent of what it did.
husband built
Some lesser husbands built a latrine on the hillside.
writing support
Writing has to support itself.
law ideas honor
The family feuds or the village feuds often had to do with an idea of honor. Perhaps it was a peasant idea; perhaps this idea of honor is especially important to a society without recourse to law or without confidence in law.
stupid people proud
In England people are very proud of being very stupid.
class people india
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.
oil clothes america
Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
attitude past
What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.
issues people enemy
Where jargon turns living issues into abstractions, and where jargon ends by competing with jargon, people don't have causes. They only have enemies.
forever culture has-beens
All cultures have been mingled forever.
reading people giving
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.
heart men ideas
Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there.