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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
Understand
Cannot
Sometimes
Inherited
Strangers
Traits
Stranger

More quotes by 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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All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.
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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.
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The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.
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I've never abandoned the novel.
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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The world outside existed in a kind of darkness and we inquired about nothing.
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If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
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Small things start us in new ways of thinking
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A cat only has itself.
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Life is a helluva thing. You can see trouble coming and you can't do a damn thing to prevent it coming. You just got to sit and watch and wait.
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People come and go all the time the world has always been in movement.
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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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I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
V. S. Naipaul
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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?
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Nothing was made in Trinidad.
V. S. Naipaul
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The world is always in movement.
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I became very interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery.
V. S. Naipaul
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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.
V. S. Naipaul
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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.
V. S. Naipaul