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After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.

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
Ideas
Make
Possibilities
According
Possibility

More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

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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.
V. S. Naipaul
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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
V. S. Naipaul
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I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
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.
V. S. Naipaul
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I've never abandoned the novel.
V. S. Naipaul
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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
V. S. Naipaul
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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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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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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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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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Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
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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His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.
V. S. Naipaul
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The world outside existed in a kind of darkness and we inquired about nothing.
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.
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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Small things start us in new ways of thinking
V. S. Naipaul
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I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
V. S. Naipaul
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If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
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