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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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V. S. Naipaul
Died: 2018
Died: August 11
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
V.S. Naipaul
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
Punished
Lies
Truly
Lying
Tell

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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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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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As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.
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I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
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Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
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You need someone to see what you've done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what's gone into it.
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Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
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But everything of value about me is in my books.
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Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
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A cat only has itself.
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All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.
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I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.
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I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
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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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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.
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Making a book is such a big enterprise.
V. S. Naipaul
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It's very attractive to people to be a victim. Instead of having to think out the whole situation, about history and your group and what you are doing... if you begin from the point of view of being a victim, you've got it half-made. I mean intellectually.
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Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.
V. S. Naipaul
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Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it's complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he's able to keep processing that as well.
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The world is what it is men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
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