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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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V. S. Naipaul
Died: 2018
Died: August 11
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
V.S. Naipaul
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
Always
Highest
Writer
Wasn
Learn
Equipped
Felt
Oxford
Left
Craft
Work
Crafts
Really
Regard

More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

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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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There are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to.
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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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.
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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We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
V. S. Naipaul
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In England people are very proud of being very stupid.
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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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.
V. S. Naipaul
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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.
V. S. Naipaul
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I went to India and met some people who had been involved in this guerrilla business, middle-class people who were rather vain and foolish. There was no revolutionary grandeur to it. Nothing.
V. S. Naipaul
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The world is always in movement.
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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Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.
V. S. Naipaul
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Nothing was made in Trinidad.
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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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.
V. S. Naipaul
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The world outside existed in a kind of darkness and we inquired about nothing.
V. S. Naipaul
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The first 50 years of the cinema were absolutely great years. Original minds were at work establishing the ways to tell a story. And what is happening now is a copying, a pastiche-ing of what was done by great men.
V. S. Naipaul
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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
V. S. Naipaul