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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

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
Writer
Reading
Kind
Think
Thinking
People

More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

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Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.
V. S. Naipaul
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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.
V. S. Naipaul
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Life doesn't have a neat beginning and a tidy end life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should be all there.
V. S. Naipaul
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Writers should provoke disagreement.
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.
V. S. Naipaul
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A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
V. S. Naipaul
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The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
V. S. Naipaul
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I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
V. S. Naipaul
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It isn't that there's no right and wrong here. There's no right.
V. S. Naipaul
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Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.
V. S. Naipaul
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I became very interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery.
V. S. Naipaul
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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.
V. S. Naipaul
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I had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment.
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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I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.
V. S. Naipaul
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The past has to be seen to be dead or the past will kill.
V. S. Naipaul
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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.
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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An autobiography can distort facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
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