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What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.

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
Suppose
General
Attitude
Past

More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

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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 don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
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The past has to be seen to be dead or the past will kill.
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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.
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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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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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The world outside existed in a kind of darkness and we inquired about nothing.
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It is important not to trust people too much.
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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
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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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I wish my prose to be transparent—I don't want the reader to stumble over me I want him to look through what I'm saying to what I'm describing. I don't want him ever to say, Oh, goodness, how nicely written this is. That would be a failure.
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In England people are very proud of being very stupid.
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One must always try to see the truth of a situation - it makes things universal.
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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I've never abandoned the novel.
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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Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.
V. S. Naipaul
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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.
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.
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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.
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