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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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V. S. Naipaul
Died: 2018
Died: August 11
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
V.S. Naipaul
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
Seems
Philistines
May
Colonial
Complexes
Complex
Seem
Anyone
Society
Trinidad
Simple
Philistine

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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 biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.
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It's very attractive to people to be a victim. Instead of having to think out the whole situation, about history and your group and what you are doing... if you begin from the point of view of being a victim, you've got it half-made. I mean intellectually.
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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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The world outside existed in a kind of darkness and we inquired about nothing.
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The past has to be seen to be dead or the past will kill.
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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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Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.
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Africa has no future.
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I wish my prose to be transparent—I don't want the reader to stumble over me I want him to look through what I'm saying to what I'm describing. I don't want him ever to say, Oh, goodness, how nicely written this is. That would be a failure.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
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I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
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The writer is all alone.
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It is important not to trust people too much.
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