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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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V. S. Naipaul
Died: 2018
Died: August 11
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
V.S. Naipaul
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
Asks
Narrative
Simple
Somehow
Understand
Discovery
Thought
Roots
Trying
Questions
Make
Became
Would
Interested
Question
Islamic

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The world is always in movement.
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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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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 profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
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I've been a free man.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
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But everything of value about me is in my books.
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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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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.
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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.
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And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of victory fills a moment and then is over
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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.
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You can't deny what you've learned you can't deny your travels you can't deny the nature of your life.
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What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.
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Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
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Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
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My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh.
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