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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

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What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.
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If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
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Writing has to support itself.
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I've been a free man.
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People come and go all the time the world has always been in movement.
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Argentine political life is like the life of an ant community or an African forest tribe: full of events, full of crisis and deaths, but life is always cyclical, and the year ends as it begins.
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There are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to.
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Making a book is such a big enterprise.
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One must always try to see the truth of a situation - it makes things universal.
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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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I will say I am the sum of my books.
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The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
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Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.
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I had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment.
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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 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.
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A businessman is someone who buys at ten and is happy to get out at twelve. The other kind of man buys at ten, sees it rise to eighteen and does nothing. He is waiting for it to rise to twenty. When it drops to two he waits for it to get back to ten.
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After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
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The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.
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I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.
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