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In Trinidad, where as new arrivals we were a disadvantaged community, that excluding idea was a kind of protection it enabled us - for the time being, and only for the time being - to live in our own way and according to our own rules, to live in our own fading India.

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
Way
Protection
Time
India
Trinidad
Rules
Excluding
Community
Disadvantaged
Idea
Arrivals
Ideas
Enabled
Live
Fading
Kind
According

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People come and go all the time the world has always been in movement.
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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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In England I am not English, in India I am not Indian. I am chained to the 1,000 square miles that is Trinidad but I will evade that fate yet.
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That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which is never an easy thing to do.
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Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it's complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he's able to keep processing that as well.
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Writers should provoke disagreement.
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The past has to be seen to be dead or the past will kill.
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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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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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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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In England people are very proud of being very stupid.
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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.
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I really wasn't equipped to be a writer when I left Oxford. But then I set out to learn. I've always had the highest regard for the craft. I've always felt it was work.
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Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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It is important not to trust people too much.
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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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