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Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.

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
America
People
Preppy
Oil
Ignorant
Clothes
Dangerous

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My life is short. I can't listen to banality.
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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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One isn’t born one’s self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people’s ideas – and you have to work through it all.
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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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In the beginning, before the arrival of the white men, I had considered myself neutral. I had wanted neither side to win, neither the army nor the rebels. As it turned out, both sides lost.
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If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.
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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
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I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie.
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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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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'm my own writer. My material means I'm entirely separate.
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Life is a helluva thing. You can see trouble coming and you can't do a damn thing to prevent it coming. You just got to sit and watch and wait.
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The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
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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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If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don't express your disregard for the essence of the culture. It's a form of aggression.
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Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand.
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If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
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In our island myth this was the prescribed end of marriages like mine: the wife goes off with someone from the Cercle Sportif, outside whose gates at night the willingly betrayed husband waits in his motorcar. The circumstances were slightly.
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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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Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.
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