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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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V. S. Naipaul
Died: 2018
Died: August 11
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
V.S. Naipaul
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
Class
Revolutionary
Rather
Foolish
Business
Vain
Nothing
Mets
People
India
Involved
Guerrilla
Went
Guerrillas
Middle
Grandeur

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I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.
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The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.
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Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand.
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We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
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Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
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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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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
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If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.
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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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Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
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The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.
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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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The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
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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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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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It is important not to trust people too much.
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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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Making a book is such a big enterprise.
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My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh.
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As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.
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