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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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V. S. Naipaul
Died: 2018
Died: August 11
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
V.S. Naipaul
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
Work
Ways
Copying
Mind
Story
Cinema
Years
Tell
Originals
Way
Stories
Original
Men
Firsts
Happenings
First
Happening
Done
Absolutely
Pastiche
Great
Minds
Establishing

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Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
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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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Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
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But everything of value about me is in my books.
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We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
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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.
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If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.
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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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We made no inquiries about India or about the families people had left behind. When our ways of thinking had changed, and we wished to know, it was too late. I know nothing of the people on my father's side I know only that some of them came from Nepal
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I'm my own writer. My material means I'm entirely separate.
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The past has to be seen to be dead or the past will kill.
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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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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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If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
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.
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One isn’t born one’s self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people’s ideas – and you have to work through it all.
V. S. Naipaul
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A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
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I have a very small public.
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I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
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