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

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This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true.
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Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
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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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Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.
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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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The past has to be seen to be dead or the past will kill.
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Argentine political life is like the life of an ant community or an African forest tribe: full of events, full of crisis and deaths, but life is always cyclical, and the year ends as it begins.
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Look, boys, it ever strike you that the world not real at all? It ever strike you that we have the only mind in the world and you just thinking up everything else? Like me here, having the only mind in the world, and thinking up you people here, thinking up the war and all the houses and the ships and them in the harbour. That ever cross your mind?
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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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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 know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
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Writers should provoke disagreement.
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If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
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People come and go all the time the world has always been in movement.
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I'm my own writer. My material means I'm entirely separate.
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