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In England I am not English, in India I am not Indian. I am chained to the 1,000 square miles that is Trinidad but I will evade that fate yet.

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
India
Trinidad
England
Evade
Fate
Chained
Square
Squares
Indian
Miles
English

More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

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I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
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Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.
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We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
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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
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In the beginning, before the arrival of the white men, I had considered myself neutral. I had wanted neither side to win, neither the army nor the rebels. As it turned out, both sides lost.
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People come and go all the time the world has always been in movement.
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But everything of value about me is in my books.
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An autobiography can distort facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
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The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.
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Nothing was made in Trinidad.
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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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If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
V. S. Naipaul
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Making a book is such a big enterprise.
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.
V. S. Naipaul
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The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid people and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and common.
V. S. Naipaul
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I've never abandoned the novel.
V. S. Naipaul
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One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
V. S. Naipaul
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Africa has no future.
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I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world.
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