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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
Possibilities
According
Possibility
Ideas
Make

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Africa has no future.
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If it was Europe that gave us on the coast some idea of our history, it was Europe, I feel, that also introduced us to the lie.
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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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If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
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One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
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I've never abandoned the novel.
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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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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.
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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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Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.
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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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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 a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.
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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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Nothing was made in Trinidad.
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Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
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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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I've been a free man.
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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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A cat only has itself.
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