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The past has to be seen to be dead or the past will kill.

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
Kill
Dead
Seen
Past

More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

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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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But everything of value about me is in my books.
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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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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 have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
V. S. Naipaul
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That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which is never an easy thing to do.
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To read a newspaper for the first time is like coming into a film that has been on for an hour. Newspapers are like serials. To understand them you have to take knowledge to them the knowledge that serves best is the knowledge provided by the newspaper itself.
V. S. Naipaul
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After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
V. S. Naipaul
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In England people are very proud of being very stupid.
V. S. Naipaul
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My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.
V. S. Naipaul
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I have a very small public.
V. S. Naipaul
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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.
V. S. Naipaul
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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
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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.
V. S. Naipaul
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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
V. S. Naipaul
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You need someone to see what you've done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what's gone into it.
V. S. Naipaul
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Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
V. S. Naipaul
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I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.
V. S. Naipaul
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Small things start us in new ways of thinking
V. S. Naipaul
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Africa has no future.
V. S. Naipaul