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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
Hostility
Writer
Dead
Doesn
Generate

More quotes by 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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All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.
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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.
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Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand.
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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.
V. S. Naipaul
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I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.
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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I will say I am the sum of my books.
V. S. Naipaul
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Nothing was made in Trinidad.
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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This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true.
V. S. Naipaul
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Writing has to support itself.
V. S. Naipaul
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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.
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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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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The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
V. S. Naipaul
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As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.
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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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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There are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to.
V. S. Naipaul