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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
Writers
Talk
Writing
Going
Much
Oppression

More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

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If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.
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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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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.
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Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.
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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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In the beginning, before the arrival of the white men, I had considered myself neutral. I had wanted neither side to win, neither the army nor the rebels. As it turned out, both sides lost.
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I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands.
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A businessman is someone who buys at ten and is happy to get out at twelve. The other kind of man buys at ten, sees it rise to eighteen and does nothing. He is waiting for it to rise to twenty. When it drops to two he waits for it to get back to ten.
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Nothing was made in Trinidad.
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It is important not to trust people too much.
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.
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As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.
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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.
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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.
V. S. Naipaul
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I've been a free man.
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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Africa has no future.
V. S. Naipaul
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The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid people and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and common.
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I've never abandoned the novel.
V. S. Naipaul
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The first 50 years of the cinema were absolutely great years. Original minds were at work establishing the ways to tell a story. And what is happening now is a copying, a pastiche-ing of what was done by great men.
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