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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
Sometimes
Inherited
Strangers
Traits
Stranger
Understand
Cannot
More quotes by V. S. Naipaul
I've never abandoned the novel.
V. S. Naipaul
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
People come and go all the time the world has always been in movement.
V. S. Naipaul
If it was Europe that gave us on the coast some idea of our history, it was Europe, I feel, that also introduced us to the lie.
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
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
In Trinidad, where as new arrivals we were a disadvantaged community, that excluding idea was a kind of protection it enabled us - for the time being, and only for the time being - to live in our own way and according to our own rules, to live in our own fading India.
V. S. Naipaul
I will say I am the sum of my books.
V. S. Naipaul
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
V. S. Naipaul
I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands.
V. S. Naipaul
Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand.
V. S. Naipaul
Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
V. S. Naipaul
After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
V. S. Naipaul
I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.
V. S. Naipaul
Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it's complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he's able to keep processing that as well.
V. S. Naipaul
But everything of value about me is in my books.
V. S. Naipaul
The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
V. S. Naipaul
I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.
V. S. Naipaul
Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
V. S. Naipaul
Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.
V. S. Naipaul