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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
Lost
Turned
Wanted
Army
Men
Neither
Rebels
Beginning
Arrival
Side
Arrivals
Sides
Neutral
Winning
Rebel
White
Considered

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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.
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I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie.
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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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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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A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
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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.
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We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
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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
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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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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
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I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
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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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In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
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The world outside existed in a kind of darkness and we inquired about nothing.
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All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.
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In England people are very proud of being very stupid.
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The world is always in movement.
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Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
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The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
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