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I have a very small public.

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
Public
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More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

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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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I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie.
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A cat only has itself.
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Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
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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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In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
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Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand.
V. S. Naipaul
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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.
V. S. Naipaul
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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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A businessman is someone who buys at ten and is happy to get out at twelve. The other kind of man buys at ten, sees it rise to eighteen and does nothing. He is waiting for it to rise to twenty. When it drops to two he waits for it to get back to ten.
V. S. Naipaul
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But everything of value about me is in my books.
V. S. Naipaul
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Some lesser husbands built a latrine on the hillside.
V. S. Naipaul
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Look, boys, it ever strike you that the world not real at all? It ever strike you that we have the only mind in the world and you just thinking up everything else? Like me here, having the only mind in the world, and thinking up you people here, thinking up the war and all the houses and the ships and them in the harbour. That ever cross your mind?
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If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.
V. S. Naipaul
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Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.
V. S. Naipaul
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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.
V. S. Naipaul
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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
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Writers should provoke disagreement.
V. S. Naipaul
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I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
V. S. Naipaul
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Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.
V. S. Naipaul