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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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I think when you see so many Hindu temples of the 10th century or earlier disfigured, defaced, you realise that something terrible happened. I feel the civilisation of that closed world was mortally wounded by those invasions the old world is destroyed. That has to be understood. Ancient Hindu India was destroyed.
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That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which is never an easy thing to do.
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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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I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.
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When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.
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I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world.
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The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.
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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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Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
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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'.
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