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91 quotes by V. S. Naipaul

Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, TC (/ˈnaɪpɔːl/ or /naɪˈpɔːl/; born 17 August 1932), is a Trinidad-born Nobel Prize-winning British writer known for his comic early novels set in Trinidad, his bleaker later novels of the wider world, and his autobiographical chronicles of life and travels. Naipaul has published more than 30 books, both of fiction and nonfiction, over some 50 years. Naipaul was married to Patricia Ann Hale from 1955 until her...
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What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material. And the fictional form was going to force you... →

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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... →

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I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.

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The world is always in movement.

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My life is short. I can't listen to banality.

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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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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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I came to London. It had become the center of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost.

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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... →

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It's very attractive to people to be a victim. Instead of having to think out the whole situation, about history and your group and what you are... →

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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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An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.

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In Trinidad, where as new arrivals we were a disadvantaged community, that excluding idea was a kind of protection; it enabled us - for the time... →

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