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The world is what it is men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

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
Become
Nothing
Men
World
Allow
Place

More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

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The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.
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If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
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The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves.
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The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
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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.
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It isn't that there's no right and wrong here. There's no right.
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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.
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I'm my own writer. My material means I'm entirely separate.
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I came to London. It had become the center of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost.
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There are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to.
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The writer is all alone.
V. S. Naipaul
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Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
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I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
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His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.
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When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.
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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'.
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Some lesser husbands built a latrine on the hillside.
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I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie.
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Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
V. S. Naipaul
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And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of victory fills a moment and then is over
V. S. Naipaul