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" I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading. "
V. S. Naipaul
I Am
People
Kind
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" I've been a free man. "
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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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" What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude. "
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" Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives. "
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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. "
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" All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there. "
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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. "
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" If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris. "
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" Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand. "
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Kicked
Thing
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" Writing has to support itself. "
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Support
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" Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society. "
V. S. Naipaul
Society
Simple
Complex
" My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world. "
V. S. Naipaul
Grief
Writing
Dirty
" Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background. "
V. S. Naipaul
Write
Always
Background
" Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others. "
V. S. Naipaul
Feel
Career
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" How can you be an atheist and have an ideology to go with it? To be an atheist is to be free of some areas of belief. I don't see how that can become an ideology. "
V. S. Naipaul
See
Atheist
Become
" One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria. "
V. S. Naipaul
Comedy
Moment
Deepest
" 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. "
V. S. Naipaul
Write
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Narrative
" The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate. "
V. S. Naipaul
City
British
Council
" I went to India and met some people who had been involved in this guerrilla business, middle-class people who were rather vain and foolish. There was no revolutionary grandeur to it. Nothing. "
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Business
People
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" I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading. "
V. S. Naipaul
People
Writer
Reading
" If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead. "
V. S. Naipaul
Writer
Hostility
He
" A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying. "
V. S. Naipaul
Over
Dying
Said
" Writers should provoke disagreement. "
V. S. Naipaul
Writers
Should
Disagreement
" If a man begins writing at thirty, by the time he is fifty or sixty, the bulk of his work has been done. By the time he is eighty, he's got nothing more, you know? "
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" An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally. "
V. S. Naipaul
Autobiography
Facts
Never
" I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time. "
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Letting
You
Time
" At school I had only admirers; I had no friends. "
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Had
Friends
School
" The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing. "
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World
Darkness
Kind
" The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next. "
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" The world is always in movement. "
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World
Movement
Always