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If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.

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
Doesn
Generate
Hostility
Writer
Dead

More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

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The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves.
V. S. Naipaul
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A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
V. S. Naipaul
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Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.
V. S. Naipaul
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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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Life is a helluva thing. You can see trouble coming and you can't do a damn thing to prevent it coming. You just got to sit and watch and wait.
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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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 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.
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Nothing was made in Trinidad.
V. S. Naipaul
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I'm my own writer. My material means I'm entirely separate.
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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Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
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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Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
V. S. Naipaul
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After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
V. S. Naipaul
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Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it it awaits the next book. It will - with luck - come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise
V. S. Naipaul
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Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.
V. S. Naipaul
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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.
V. S. Naipaul
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But everything of value about me is in my books.
V. S. Naipaul
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I will say I am the sum of my books.
V. S. Naipaul