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One isn’t born one’s self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people’s ideas – and you have to work through it all.
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
Work
People
Expectations
Mass
Born
Ideas
Self
More quotes by V. S. Naipaul
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
I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands.
V. S. Naipaul
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
When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.
V. S. Naipaul
The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.
V. S. Naipaul
My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.
V. S. Naipaul
I became very interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery.
V. S. Naipaul
We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
V. S. Naipaul
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
All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.
V. S. Naipaul
All cultures have been mingled forever.
V. S. Naipaul
I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
V. S. Naipaul
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
I've been a free man.
V. S. Naipaul
I will say I am the sum of my books.
V. S. Naipaul
I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie.
V. S. Naipaul
But everything of value about me is in my books.
V. S. Naipaul
A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
V. S. Naipaul
Small things start us in new ways of thinking
V. S. Naipaul
Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.
V. S. Naipaul
