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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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To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn't know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.
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The world outside existed in a kind of darkness and we inquired about nothing.
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I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie.
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The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
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We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
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Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
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If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
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Life doesn't have a neat beginning and a tidy end life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should be all there.
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I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
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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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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'.
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I have a very small public.
V. S. Naipaul
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A cat only has itself.
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Some lesser husbands built a latrine on the hillside.
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Africa has no future.
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If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don't express your disregard for the essence of the culture. It's a form of aggression.
V. S. Naipaul
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In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
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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All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.
V. S. Naipaul
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We made no inquiries about India or about the families people had left behind. When our ways of thinking had changed, and we wished to know, it was too late. I know nothing of the people on my father's side I know only that some of them came from Nepal
V. S. Naipaul