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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
Benefits
Stupid
Full
Common
Running
Thing
World
Melancholy
People
Benefit

More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

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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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Some lesser husbands built a latrine on the hillside.
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The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.
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And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of victory fills a moment and then is over
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It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut.
V. S. Naipaul
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Making a book is such a big enterprise.
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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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I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie.
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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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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The world outside existed in a kind of darkness and we inquired about nothing.
V. S. Naipaul
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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.
V. S. Naipaul
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In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
V. S. Naipaul
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I will say I am the sum of my books.
V. S. Naipaul
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The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.
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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Where jargon turns living issues into abstractions, and where jargon ends by competing with jargon, people don't have causes. They only have enemies.
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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Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.
V. S. Naipaul
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His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.
V. S. Naipaul