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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
Always
Incompleteness
Biography
Biographies
Autobiography
Writer
Even

More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

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After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
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The writer is all alone.
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Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand.
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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.
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I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands.
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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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A cat only has itself.
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Africa has no future.
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.
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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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But everything of value about me is in my books.
V. S. Naipaul
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One must always try to see the truth of a situation - it makes things universal.
V. S. Naipaul
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The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
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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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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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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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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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
V. S. Naipaul
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I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
V. S. Naipaul
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It has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter'.
V. S. Naipaul