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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
The writer is all alone.
V. S. Naipaul
All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.
V. S. Naipaul
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
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
The past has to be seen to be dead or the past will kill.
V. S. Naipaul
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.
V. S. Naipaul
Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.
V. S. Naipaul
Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
V. S. Naipaul
It's very attractive to people to be a victim. Instead of having to think out the whole situation, about history and your group and what you are doing... if you begin from the point of view of being a victim, you've got it half-made. I mean intellectually.
V. S. Naipaul
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.
V. S. Naipaul
You can't deny what you've learned you can't deny your travels you can't deny the nature of your life.
V. S. Naipaul
Some lesser husbands built a latrine on the hillside.
V. S. Naipaul
The world is what it is men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
V. S. Naipaul
My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.
V. S. Naipaul
If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.
V. S. Naipaul
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.
V. S. Naipaul
Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.
V. S. Naipaul
Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand.
V. S. Naipaul
To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn't know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.
V. S. Naipaul
In England people are very proud of being very stupid.
V. S. Naipaul
