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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.
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
White
Considered
Lost
Turned
Wanted
Army
Men
Neither
Rebels
Beginning
Arrival
Side
Arrivals
Sides
Neutral
Winning
Rebel
More quotes by V. S. Naipaul
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
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
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 world is what it is men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
V. S. Naipaul
Life is a helluva thing. You can see trouble coming and you can't do a damn thing to prevent it coming. You just got to sit and watch and wait.
V. S. Naipaul
If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
V. S. Naipaul
It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut.
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
The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.
V. S. Naipaul
All cultures have been mingled forever.
V. S. Naipaul
How could people like these, without words to put to their emotions and passions, manage? They could, at best, only suffer dumbly. Their pains and humiliations would work themselves out in their characters alone: like evil spirits possessing a body, so that the body itself might appear innocent of what it did.
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
I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.
V. S. Naipaul
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'.
V. S. Naipaul
We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
V. S. Naipaul
One must always try to see the truth of a situation - it makes things universal.
V. S. Naipaul
Africa is not a fun place, you know. A fun place is somewhere that lifts the spirits, that cossets the senses. I don't think that can be said of the Africa I traveled in.
V. S. Naipaul
I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.
V. S. Naipaul
I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
V. S. Naipaul
If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.
V. S. Naipaul
