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But everything of value about me is in my books.

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
Value
Books
Values
Everything
Book

More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

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A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
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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.
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Small things start us in new ways of thinking
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.
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I really wasn't equipped to be a writer when I left Oxford. But then I set out to learn. I've always had the highest regard for the craft. I've always felt it was work.
V. S. Naipaul
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We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
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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His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.
V. S. Naipaul
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Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.
V. S. Naipaul
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I think when you see so many Hindu temples of the 10th century or earlier disfigured, defaced, you realise that something terrible happened. I feel the civilisation of that closed world was mortally wounded by those invasions the old world is destroyed. That has to be understood. Ancient Hindu India was destroyed.
V. S. Naipaul
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Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
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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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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Writers should provoke disagreement.
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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Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.
V. S. Naipaul
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When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.
V. S. Naipaul
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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.
V. S. Naipaul
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The past has to be seen to be dead or the past will kill.
V. S. Naipaul
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The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.
V. S. Naipaul