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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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V. S. Naipaul
Died: 2018
Died: August 11
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
V.S. Naipaul
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
People
Benefit
Benefits
Stupid
Full
Common
Running
Thing
World
Melancholy

More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

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If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
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My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh.
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I came to London. It had become the center of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost.
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Life doesn't have a neat beginning and a tidy end life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should be all there.
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I've been a free man.
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People come and go all the time the world has always been in movement.
V. S. Naipaul
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The world outside existed in a kind of darkness and we inquired about nothing.
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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.
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.
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I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.
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I'm my own writer. My material means I'm entirely separate.
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A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
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
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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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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.
V. S. Naipaul
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To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn't know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.
V. S. Naipaul
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If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
V. S. Naipaul
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Africa is not a fun place, you know. A fun place is somewhere that lifts the spirits, that cossets the senses. I don't think that can be said of the Africa I traveled in.
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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After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
V. S. Naipaul