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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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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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If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.
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In England people are very proud of being very stupid.
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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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Life doesn't have a neat beginning and a tidy end life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should be all there.
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I have a very small public.
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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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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.
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It is important not to trust people too much.
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Small things start us in new ways of thinking
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A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
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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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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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We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
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You can't deny what you've learned you can't deny your travels you can't deny the nature of your life.
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Africa is not a fun place, you know. A fun place is somewhere that lifts the spirits, that cossets the senses. I don't think that can be said of the Africa I traveled in.
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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.
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If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.
V. S. Naipaul
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In England I am not English, in India I am not Indian. I am chained to the 1,000 square miles that is Trinidad but I will evade that fate yet.
V. S. Naipaul
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Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
V. S. Naipaul