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

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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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Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand.
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The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid people and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and common.
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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 know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
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The past has to be seen to be dead or the past will kill.
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If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.
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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 had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment.
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An autobiography can distort facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
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I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.
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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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The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.
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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 you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don't express your disregard for the essence of the culture. It's a form of aggression.
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One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
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