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One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

V. S. Naipaul

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V. S. Naipaul
Died: 2018
Died: August 11
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
V.S. Naipaul
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
Deepest
Comedy
Moment
Moments
Writing
Always
Hysteria
Writes

More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

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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.
V. S. Naipaul
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It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut.
V. S. Naipaul
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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
V. S. Naipaul
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We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
V. S. Naipaul
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The world is always in movement.
V. S. Naipaul
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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
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If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
V. S. Naipaul
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After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
V. S. Naipaul
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Writers should provoke disagreement.
V. S. Naipaul
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Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.
V. S. Naipaul
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It has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter'.
V. S. Naipaul
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Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand.
V. S. Naipaul
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Where jargon turns living issues into abstractions, and where jargon ends by competing with jargon, people don't have causes. They only have enemies.
V. S. Naipaul
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I've never abandoned the novel.
V. S. Naipaul
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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.
V. S. Naipaul
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I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
V. S. Naipaul
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I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world.
V. S. Naipaul
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In our island myth this was the prescribed end of marriages like mine: the wife goes off with someone from the Cercle Sportif, outside whose gates at night the willingly betrayed husband waits in his motorcar. The circumstances were slightly.
V. S. Naipaul
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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.
V. S. Naipaul
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His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.
V. S. Naipaul