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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

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My life is short. I can't listen to banality.
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An autobiography can distort facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
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After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
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But everything of value about me is in my books.
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We made no inquiries about India or about the families people had left behind. When our ways of thinking had changed, and we wished to know, it was too late. I know nothing of the people on my father's side I know only that some of them came from Nepal
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A businessman is someone who buys at ten and is happy to get out at twelve. The other kind of man buys at ten, sees it rise to eighteen and does nothing. He is waiting for it to rise to twenty. When it drops to two he waits for it to get back to ten.
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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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If it was Europe that gave us on the coast some idea of our history, it was Europe, I feel, that also introduced us to the lie.
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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.
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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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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.
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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
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Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.
V. S. Naipaul
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I will say I am the sum of my books.
V. S. Naipaul
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Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.
V. S. Naipaul
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Africa has no future.
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In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
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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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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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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.
V. S. Naipaul