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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
More quotes by V. S. Naipaul
After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
V. S. Naipaul
Argentine political life is like the life of an ant community or an African forest tribe: full of events, full of crisis and deaths, but life is always cyclical, and the year ends as it begins.
V. S. Naipaul
One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
V. S. Naipaul
The world outside existed in a kind of darkness and we inquired about nothing.
V. S. Naipaul
All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.
V. S. Naipaul
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.
V. S. Naipaul
I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
V. S. Naipaul
Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.
V. S. Naipaul
I wish my prose to be transparent—I don't want the reader to stumble over me I want him to look through what I'm saying to what I'm describing. I don't want him ever to say, Oh, goodness, how nicely written this is. That would be a failure.
V. S. Naipaul
The family feuds or the village feuds often had to do with an idea of honor. Perhaps it was a peasant idea perhaps this idea of honor is especially important to a society without recourse to law or without confidence in law.
V. S. Naipaul
Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.
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
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.
V. S. Naipaul
It's very attractive to people to be a victim. Instead of having to think out the whole situation, about history and your group and what you are doing... if you begin from the point of view of being a victim, you've got it half-made. I mean intellectually.
V. S. Naipaul
Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand.
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
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.
V. S. Naipaul
If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.
V. S. Naipaul
I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
V. S. Naipaul
The past has to be seen to be dead or the past will kill.
V. S. Naipaul
