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A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.

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
World
Civilization
Dying
Taken
Cannot

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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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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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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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I came to London. It had become the center of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost.
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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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In England people are very proud of being very stupid.
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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.
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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.
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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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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 is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling.
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I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.
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Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.
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Writers should provoke disagreement.
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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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If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
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The world outside existed in a kind of darkness and we inquired about nothing.
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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
V. S. Naipaul
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How could people like these, without words to put to their emotions and passions, manage? They could, at best, only suffer dumbly. Their pains and humiliations would work themselves out in their characters alone: like evil spirits possessing a body, so that the body itself might appear innocent of what it did.
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All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.
V. S. Naipaul