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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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V. S. Naipaul
Died: 2018
Died: August 11
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
V.S. Naipaul
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
Past
Peoples
Doe
Destroy
Matter
Effect
Exist
Calamitous
Effects
Ancestral
History
Converted
Culture
Stamp
Doesn
Stamps
More quotes by V. S. Naipaul
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.
V. S. Naipaul
My life is short. I can't listen to banality.
V. S. Naipaul
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
The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
V. S. Naipaul
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
I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
V. S. Naipaul
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
Men need history it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart it is enough that there is something there.
V. S. Naipaul
Africa has no future.
V. S. Naipaul
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?
V. S. Naipaul
One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
V. S. Naipaul
The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.
V. S. Naipaul
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
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
An autobiography can distort facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
V. S. Naipaul
I've never abandoned the novel.
V. S. Naipaul
I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
V. S. Naipaul
After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
V. S. Naipaul
Writing has to support itself.
V. S. Naipaul
There are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to.
V. S. Naipaul
