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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
Inherited
Strangers
Traits
Stranger
Understand
Cannot
Sometimes

More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

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If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.
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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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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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All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.
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How could people like these, without words to put to their emotions and passions, manage? They could, at best, only suffer dumbly. Their pains and humiliations would work themselves out in their characters alone: like evil spirits possessing a body, so that the body itself might appear innocent of what it did.
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An autobiography can distort facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
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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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One must always try to see the truth of a situation - it makes things universal.
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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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All cultures have been mingled forever.
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I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.
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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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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.
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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People come and go all the time the world has always been in movement.
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If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
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.
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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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You need someone to see what you've done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what's gone into it.
V. S. Naipaul
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If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
V. S. Naipaul