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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
Nothing
Mets
People
India
Involved
Guerrilla
Went
Guerrillas
Middle
Grandeur
Class
Revolutionary
Rather
Foolish
Business
Vain
More quotes by V. S. Naipaul
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.
V. S. Naipaul
I really wasn't equipped to be a writer when I left Oxford. But then I set out to learn. I've always had the highest regard for the craft. I've always felt it was work.
V. S. Naipaul
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.
V. S. Naipaul
Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand.
V. S. Naipaul
Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it's complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he's able to keep processing that as well.
V. S. Naipaul
I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands.
V. S. Naipaul
It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling.
V. S. Naipaul
Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.
V. S. Naipaul
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?
V. S. Naipaul
If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.
V. S. Naipaul
We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
V. S. Naipaul
I've never abandoned the novel.
V. S. Naipaul
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.
V. S. Naipaul
Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.
V. S. Naipaul
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.
V. S. Naipaul
Writing has to support itself.
V. S. Naipaul
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.
V. S. Naipaul
The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
V. S. Naipaul
I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
V. S. Naipaul
It is important not to trust people too much.
V. S. Naipaul
