V. S. Naipaul
Novelist
1932-08-17
Quotes by V. S. Naipaul
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The writer is all alone.
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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.
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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.'
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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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I had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment.
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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.
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One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
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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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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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In the beginning, before the arrival of the white men, I had considered myself neutral. I had wanted neither side to win, neither the army nor the rebels. As it turned out, both sides lost.
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The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves.
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