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

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Life doesn't have a neat beginning and a tidy end life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should be all there.
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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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In the beginning, before the arrival of the white men, I had considered myself neutral. I had wanted neither side to win, neither the army nor the rebels. As it turned out, both sides lost.
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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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Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.
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It has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter'.
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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.
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Small things start us in new ways of thinking
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The writer is all alone.
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If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
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I went to India and met some people who had been involved in this guerrilla business, middle-class people who were rather vain and foolish. There was no revolutionary grandeur to it. Nothing.
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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.
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The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.
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It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling.
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We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
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In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
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It's very attractive to people to be a victim. Instead of having to think out the whole situation, about history and your group and what you are doing... if you begin from the point of view of being a victim, you've got it half-made. I mean intellectually.
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This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true.
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