V. S. Naipaul Quotes

• 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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• It is important not to trust people too much.

  V. S. Naipaul

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• In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.

  V. S. Naipaul

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• I’ve never abandoned the novel.

  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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• 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.

  V. S. Naipaul

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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.

  V. S. Naipaul

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• If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.

  V. S. Naipaul

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• I’m very content.

  V. S. Naipaul

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• There are certain things that are too painful for people to even write about sometimes, and there are certain things that are too hard to read about again.

  V. S. Naipaul

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• 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

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• The longer I live the more convinced I become that one of the greatest honors we can confer on other people is to see them as they are, to recognize not only that they exist, but that they exist in specific ways and have specific realities.

  V. S. Naipaul

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• To be a writer you have to be out in the world, you have to risk yourself in the world, you have to be immersed in the world, you have to go out looking for it. This becomes harder as you get older because there’s less energy, the days are shorter for older people and it’s not so easy to go out and immerse oneself in the world outside.

  V. S. Naipaul

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• My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh.

  V. S. Naipaul

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• There are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to.

  V. S. Naipaul

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• The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.

  V. S. Naipaul

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• The writer is all alone.

  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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• One must always try to see the truth of a situation – it makes things universal.

  V. S. Naipaul

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• To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say ‘my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn’t matter.’

  V. S. Naipaul

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V. S. Naipaul (88)

Birth:	17th August, 1932
Nationality:	British, Trinidadian
Profession:	Essayist, Novelist

About

Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad is a Trinidadian-British writer of Indo-Trinidadian heritage of Kanyakubja Brahmin known for his novels focusing on the legacy of the British Empire's colonialism. He has also written works of non-fiction, such as travel writing and essays.

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Births

• 1979 - Mark Warkentin
• 1908 - Joseph McCarthy
• 1904 - Michael Ramsey
• 1939 - Wendy Carlos
• 1971 - Vikas Khanna

Deaths

• 2000 - Robert Trout
• 1991 - Tony Richardson
• 1946 - May Sinclair
• 2008 - Kristin Hunter
• 1633 - William Ames