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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

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
People
Sides
Families
Came
India
Father
Late
Left
Behinds
Nothing
Behind
Nepal
Made
Side
Inquiries
Way
Changed
Wished
Thinking
Ways
Inquiry

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If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don't express your disregard for the essence of the culture. It's a form of aggression.
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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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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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I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world.
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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.
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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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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.
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Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
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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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Africa has no future.
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We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
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The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.
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Small things start us in new ways of thinking
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Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it it awaits the next book. It will - with luck - come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise
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Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
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And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of victory fills a moment and then is over
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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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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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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
V. S. Naipaul
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The world is what it is men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
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