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Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand.

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
Africans
Kicked
Understand
Need
Needs
Thing

More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

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Look, boys, it ever strike you that the world not real at all? It ever strike you that we have the only mind in the world and you just thinking up everything else? Like me here, having the only mind in the world, and thinking up you people here, thinking up the war and all the houses and the ships and them in the harbour. That ever cross your mind?
V. S. Naipaul
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One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
V. S. Naipaul
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Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
V. S. Naipaul
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Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.
V. S. Naipaul
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I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie.
V. S. Naipaul
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It is important not to trust people too much.
V. S. Naipaul
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Africa has no future.
V. S. Naipaul
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How could people like these, without words to put to their emotions and passions, manage? They could, at best, only suffer dumbly. Their pains and humiliations would work themselves out in their characters alone: like evil spirits possessing a body, so that the body itself might appear innocent of what it did.
V. S. Naipaul
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I really wasn't equipped to be a writer when I left Oxford. But then I set out to learn. I've always had the highest regard for the craft. I've always felt it was work.
V. S. Naipaul
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That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which is never an easy thing to do.
V. S. Naipaul
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We made no inquiries about India or about the families people had left behind. When our ways of thinking had changed, and we wished to know, it was too late. I know nothing of the people on my father's side I know only that some of them came from Nepal
V. S. Naipaul
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If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
V. S. Naipaul
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It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling.
V. S. Naipaul
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I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.
V. S. Naipaul
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Writing has to support itself.
V. S. Naipaul
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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.
V. S. Naipaul
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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
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The past has to be seen to be dead or the past will kill.
V. S. Naipaul
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Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
V. S. Naipaul
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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.
V. S. Naipaul