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Judgment is contained in the act of trying to 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
Understand
Trying
Contained
Judgment

More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

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Argentine political life is like the life of an ant community or an African forest tribe: full of events, full of crisis and deaths, but life is always cyclical, and the year ends as it begins.
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Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
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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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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.
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The past has to be seen to be dead or the past will kill.
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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.
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Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.
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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.
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In England people are very proud of being very stupid.
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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.
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I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
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Writers should provoke disagreement.
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His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.
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But everything of value about me is in my books.
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In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
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One isn’t born one’s self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people’s ideas – and you have to work through it all.
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One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
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I have a very small public.
V. S. Naipaul
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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
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If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.
V. S. Naipaul