Quote #10

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.

More from V.S. Naipaul

  1. Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
  2. One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
  3. Before comfort had been squeezed out of the hard land, like blood out of stone.
  4. To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot a…
  5. And whenever I saw Luis, Graca's husband, I dealt with him with a friendship that was quite genuine, since it was offered out of gratitude …
  6. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true. It might seem strange that a man who has dealt in…
  7. I thought how terrible it would have been if, as could so easily have happened, I had died without knowing this depth of satisfaction, this…
  8. I could scarcely bear to look at her eyes. They promised such intimacies.

All V.S. Naipaul quotes