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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
Ancestry
Beyond
Father
Mother
Cannot
Blurred

More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

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If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.
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One must always try to see the truth of a situation - it makes things universal.
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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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People come and go all the time the world has always been in movement.
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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.
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I have a very small public.
V. S. Naipaul
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I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie.
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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My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.
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'.
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Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.
V. S. Naipaul
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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.
V. S. Naipaul
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If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
V. S. Naipaul
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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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Writing has to support itself.
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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One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
V. S. Naipaul
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I went to India and met some people who had been involved in this guerrilla business, middle-class people who were rather vain and foolish. There was no revolutionary grandeur to it. Nothing.
V. S. Naipaul
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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.
V. S. Naipaul
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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.
V. S. Naipaul