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The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.

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
Biographies
Autobiography
Writer
Even
Always
Incompleteness
Biography

More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

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To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn't know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.
V. S. Naipaul
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If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.
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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An autobiography can distort facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
V. S. Naipaul
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The world is always in movement.
V. S. Naipaul
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I became very interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery.
V. S. Naipaul
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It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut.
V. S. Naipaul
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Writers should provoke disagreement.
V. S. Naipaul
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I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.
V. S. Naipaul
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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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In Trinidad, where as new arrivals we were a disadvantaged community, that excluding idea was a kind of protection it enabled us - for the time being, and only for the time being - to live in our own way and according to our own rules, to live in our own fading India.
V. S. Naipaul
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The world is what it is men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
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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The writer is all alone.
V. S. Naipaul
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People come and go all the time the world has always been in movement.
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.
V. S. Naipaul
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Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.
V. S. Naipaul
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To read a newspaper for the first time is like coming into a film that has been on for an hour. Newspapers are like serials. To understand them you have to take knowledge to them the knowledge that serves best is the knowledge provided by the newspaper itself.
V. S. Naipaul
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The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.
V. S. Naipaul
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Africa has no future.
V. S. Naipaul