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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.

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
Ideal
Starts
Ideals
View
Views
Wrong
Unravelling
Everything
Mischief
World
Ideology

More quotes by 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
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Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand.
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I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.
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I will say I am the sum of my books.
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I'm my own writer. My material means I'm entirely separate.
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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
V. S. Naipaul
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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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In our island myth this was the prescribed end of marriages like mine: the wife goes off with someone from the Cercle Sportif, outside whose gates at night the willingly betrayed husband waits in his motorcar. The circumstances were slightly.
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Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
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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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Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
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Writers should provoke disagreement.
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It has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter'.
V. S. Naipaul
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Some lesser husbands built a latrine on the hillside.
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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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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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An autobiography can distort facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
V. S. Naipaul
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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.
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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It is important not to trust people too much.
V. S. Naipaul