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My life is short. I can't listen to banality.

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
Life
Banality
Short
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More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

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I have a very small public.
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I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.
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If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.
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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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One must always try to see the truth of a situation - it makes things universal.
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One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
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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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Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
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All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.
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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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You can't deny what you've learned you can't deny your travels you can't deny the nature of your life.
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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
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It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut.
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.
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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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Men need history it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart it is enough that there is something there.
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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The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
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
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Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
V. S. Naipaul