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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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V. S. Naipaul
Died: 2018
Died: August 11
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
V.S. Naipaul
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
Easy
Two
Lightly
Way
Considered
Name
Ways
Names
Talk
Talking

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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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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.
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It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling.
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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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Where jargon turns living issues into abstractions, and where jargon ends by competing with jargon, people don't have causes. They only have enemies.
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But everything of value about me is in my books.
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The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
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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?
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I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie.
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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
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Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.
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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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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.
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I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
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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This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true.
V. S. Naipaul
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I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
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Africa has no future.
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I had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment.
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The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.
V. S. Naipaul