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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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V. S. Naipaul
Died: 2018
Died: August 11
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
V.S. Naipaul
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
Oppression
Writers
Talk
Writing
Going
Much

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All cultures have been mingled forever.
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Small things start us in new ways of thinking
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An autobiography can distort facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
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I went to India and met some people who had been involved in this guerrilla business, middle-class people who were rather vain and foolish. There was no revolutionary grandeur to it. Nothing.
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Making a book is such a big enterprise.
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I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie.
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Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it's complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he's able to keep processing that as well.
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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.
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My life is short. I can't listen to banality.
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It isn't that there's no right and wrong here. There's no right.
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Africa is not a fun place, you know. A fun place is somewhere that lifts the spirits, that cossets the senses. I don't think that can be said of the Africa I traveled in.
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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.
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A cat only has itself.
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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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Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.
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We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
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My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.
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Writing has to support itself.
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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.
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If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.
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