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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
Biography
Biographies
Autobiography
Writer
Even
Always
Incompleteness

More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

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If it was Europe that gave us on the coast some idea of our history, it was Europe, I feel, that also introduced us to the lie.
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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An autobiography can distort facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
V. S. Naipaul
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What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.
V. S. Naipaul
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Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand.
V. S. Naipaul
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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 you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don't express your disregard for the essence of the culture. It's a form of aggression.
V. S. Naipaul
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Africa is not a fun place, you know. A fun place is somewhere that lifts the spirits, that cossets the senses. I don't think that can be said of the Africa I traveled in.
V. S. Naipaul
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My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.
V. S. Naipaul
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The family feuds or the village feuds often had to do with an idea of honor. Perhaps it was a peasant idea perhaps this idea of honor is especially important to a society without recourse to law or without confidence in law.
V. S. Naipaul
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But everything of value about me is in my books.
V. S. Naipaul
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I really wasn't equipped to be a writer when I left Oxford. But then I set out to learn. I've always had the highest regard for the craft. I've always felt it was work.
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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Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.
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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Nothing was made in Trinidad.
V. S. Naipaul
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I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
V. S. Naipaul
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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.
V. S. Naipaul
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It isn't that there's no right and wrong here. There's no right.
V. S. Naipaul
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One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
V. S. Naipaul