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The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves.

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
Wanted
Done
Europeans
Good
Statues
Things
Slaves
Time
Slave
Like
Gold
People
Everybody
Else

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I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world.
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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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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.
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The past has to be seen to be dead or the past will kill.
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I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.
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Africa has no future.
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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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My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh.
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Where jargon turns living issues into abstractions, and where jargon ends by competing with jargon, people don't have causes. They only have enemies.
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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.
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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.
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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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All cultures have been mingled forever.
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I've never abandoned the novel.
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Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.
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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.
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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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I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands.
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I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
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When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.
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