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I've never abandoned the novel.

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
Never
Abandoned
Novel

More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

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Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
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The first 50 years of the cinema were absolutely great years. Original minds were at work establishing the ways to tell a story. And what is happening now is a copying, a pastiche-ing of what was done by great men.
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Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.
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In our island myth this was the prescribed end of marriages like mine: the wife goes off with someone from the Cercle Sportif, outside whose gates at night the willingly betrayed husband waits in his motorcar. The circumstances were slightly.
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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.
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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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Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it it awaits the next book. It will - with luck - come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise
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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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Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand.
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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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We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
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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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Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.
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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 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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The world outside existed in a kind of darkness and we inquired about nothing.
V. S. Naipaul
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In England people are very proud of being very stupid.
V. S. Naipaul
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Africa has no future.
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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I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
V. S. Naipaul