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I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.

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
Mother
Cannot
Blurred
Ancestry
Beyond
Father

More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

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What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.
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Where jargon turns living issues into abstractions, and where jargon ends by competing with jargon, people don't have causes. They only have enemies.
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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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Africa is not a fun place, you know. A fun place is somewhere that lifts the spirits, that cossets the senses. I don't think that can be said of the Africa I traveled in.
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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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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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The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
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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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Some lesser husbands built a latrine on the hillside.
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I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world.
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I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie.
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The world is what it is men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
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We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
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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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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.
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And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of victory fills a moment and then is over
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This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true.
V. S. Naipaul
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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.
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.
V. S. Naipaul
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His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.
V. S. Naipaul