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It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut.

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
Many
Walking
Neutral
Heart
Cities
Separated
Years
Knew
Outward
Good
Path
Paths
Narrowest
Getting
Unknown
Jumble
Lost
Defined
Stretches
Place
City
Explored
Ever
Cutting
Clearing

More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

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Some lesser husbands built a latrine on the hillside.
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The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.
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How could people like these, without words to put to their emotions and passions, manage? They could, at best, only suffer dumbly. Their pains and humiliations would work themselves out in their characters alone: like evil spirits possessing a body, so that the body itself might appear innocent of what it did.
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Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
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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 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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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.
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The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
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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.
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Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand.
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.
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Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.
V. S. Naipaul
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People come and go all the time the world has always been in movement.
V. S. Naipaul
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In the beginning, before the arrival of the white men, I had considered myself neutral. I had wanted neither side to win, neither the army nor the rebels. As it turned out, both sides lost.
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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Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.
V. S. Naipaul
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I've been a free man.
V. S. Naipaul
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To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn't know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.
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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.
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