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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
Going
Much
Oppression
Writers
Talk
Writing

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The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
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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.
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Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand.
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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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Where jargon turns living issues into abstractions, and where jargon ends by competing with jargon, people don't have causes. They only have enemies.
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Making a book is such a big enterprise.
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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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The world is always in movement.
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The past has to be seen to be dead or the past will kill.
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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
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Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.
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It is important not to trust people too much.
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The world outside existed in a kind of darkness and we inquired about nothing.
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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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I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.
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The writer is all alone.
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If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don't express your disregard for the essence of the culture. It's a form of aggression.
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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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Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.
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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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