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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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V. S. Naipaul
Died: 2018
Died: August 11
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
V.S. Naipaul
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
Cannot
Sometimes
Inherited
Strangers
Traits
Stranger
Understand

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Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
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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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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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My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.
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You need someone to see what you've done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what's gone into it.
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To read a newspaper for the first time is like coming into a film that has been on for an hour. Newspapers are like serials. To understand them you have to take knowledge to them the knowledge that serves best is the knowledge provided by the newspaper itself.
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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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A cat only has itself.
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People come and go all the time the world has always been in movement.
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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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A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
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Some lesser husbands built a latrine on the hillside.
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What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.
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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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The family feuds or the village feuds often had to do with an idea of honor. Perhaps it was a peasant idea perhaps this idea of honor is especially important to a society without recourse to law or without confidence in law.
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I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.
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Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.
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All cultures have been mingled forever.
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One isn’t born one’s self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people’s ideas – and you have to work through it all.
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I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie.
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