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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
Involved
Guerrilla
Went
Guerrillas
Middle
Grandeur
Class
Revolutionary
Rather
Foolish
Business
Vain
Nothing
Mets
People
India

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The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid people and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and common.
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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 think when you see so many Hindu temples of the 10th century or earlier disfigured, defaced, you realise that something terrible happened. I feel the civilisation of that closed world was mortally wounded by those invasions the old world is destroyed. That has to be understood. Ancient Hindu India was destroyed.
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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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Some lesser husbands built a latrine on the hillside.
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How could people like these, without words to put to their emotions and passions, manage? They could, at best, only suffer dumbly. Their pains and humiliations would work themselves out in their characters alone: like evil spirits possessing a body, so that the body itself might appear innocent of what it did.
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I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
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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 have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.
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I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie.
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Writers should provoke disagreement.
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Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.
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I came to London. It had become the center of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost.
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I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands.
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I have a very small public.
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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 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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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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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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I will say I am the sum of my books.
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