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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

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
Book
Surprise
Come
Luck
Awaits
Take
Aware
Formed
Writing
Whatever
Extra
Moment
Extras
Given
Hardly
Next
Actual
Moments
Fully

More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

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One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
V. S. Naipaul
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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.
V. S. Naipaul
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The writer is all alone.
V. S. Naipaul
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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
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My life is short. I can't listen to banality.
V. S. Naipaul
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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.
V. S. Naipaul
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A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
V. S. Naipaul
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To read a newspaper for the first time is like coming into a film that has been on for an hour. Newspapers are like serials. To understand them you have to take knowledge to them the knowledge that serves best is the knowledge provided by the newspaper itself.
V. S. Naipaul
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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.
V. S. Naipaul
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The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
V. S. Naipaul
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The first 50 years of the cinema were absolutely great years. Original minds were at work establishing the ways to tell a story. And what is happening now is a copying, a pastiche-ing of what was done by great men.
V. S. Naipaul
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His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.
V. S. Naipaul
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Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.
V. S. Naipaul
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Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.
V. S. Naipaul
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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.
V. S. Naipaul
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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.
V. S. Naipaul
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It is important not to trust people too much.
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.
V. S. Naipaul
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The world outside existed in a kind of darkness and we inquired about nothing.
V. S. Naipaul
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As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.
V. S. Naipaul