V. S. Naipaul Quotes

• 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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  Tags in Need, See

• Writing has to support itself.

  V. S. Naipaul

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• Writers should provoke disagreement.

  V. S. Naipaul

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• Whenever I have had to write fiction, I’ve always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.

  V. S. Naipaul

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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

  V. S. Naipaul

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• Making a book is such a big enterprise.

  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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• My life is short. I can’t listen to banality.

  V. S. Naipaul

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• Nothing was made in Trinidad.

  V. S. Naipaul

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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.

  V. S. Naipaul

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  Tags in Self

• 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.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Topics in Experience

  Tags in Childhood

• 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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  Tags in Cinema, Great

• 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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• 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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• Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.

  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

  Topics in Past

• 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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  Tags in People, Painful

• The writer is all alone.

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

  V. S. Naipaul

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  Tags in Aspect

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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Today's Anniversary - 14th November

Births

• 1922 - Veronica Lake
• 1962 - Laura San Giacomo
• 1971 - Vikas Khanna
• 1927 - McLean Stevenson
• 1906 - Louise Brooks

Deaths

• 1946 - May Sinclair
• 1819 - William Samuel Johnson
• 2001 - Percy Ross
• 2012 - Norodom Sihamoni
• 2008 - Kristin Hunter