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An autobiography can distort facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.

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
Lies
Writer
Fiction
Lying
Distort
Facts
Autobiography
Never
Reveals
Deceit
Totally

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After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
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If it was Europe that gave us on the coast some idea of our history, it was Europe, I feel, that also introduced us to the lie.
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His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.
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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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All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.
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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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A cat only has itself.
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In England people are very proud of being very stupid.
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Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.
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That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which is never an easy thing to do.
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I really wasn't equipped to be a writer when I left Oxford. But then I set out to learn. I've always had the highest regard for the craft. I've always felt it was work.
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In England I am not English, in India I am not Indian. I am chained to the 1,000 square miles that is Trinidad but I will evade that fate yet.
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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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The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.
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In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
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I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.
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Argentine political life is like the life of an ant community or an African forest tribe: full of events, full of crisis and deaths, but life is always cyclical, and the year ends as it begins.
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You need someone to see what you've done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what's gone into it.
V. S. Naipaul
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I wish my prose to be transparent—I don't want the reader to stumble over me I want him to look through what I'm saying to what I'm describing. I don't want him ever to say, Oh, goodness, how nicely written this is. That would be a failure.
V. S. Naipaul
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The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
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