“The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.”
Author detail
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul (17 August 1932 – 11 August 2018) was a Trinidadian-born British writer of works of fiction and nonfiction in English. He is known for his comic early novels set in Trinidad, his bleaker novels of alienation in the wider world, and his vigilant chronicles of life and travels. He published more than thirty books over fifty years. Naipaul's breakthrough novel *A House for Mr Biswas* was published in 1961. He won the Booker Prize in 1971 for his novel In a *Free State,* and the Jerusalem Prize in 1983. In 1990, he was awarded the Trinity Cross, Trinidad and Tobago's highest national honour. He received a knighthood in Britain in 1990, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. Some of his other works include *The Guerillas* (1975), *The Middle Passage* (1962) *A Bend in the River* (1979), *Among the Believers* (1981), *The Enigma of Arrival* (1987), *India: A Million Mutinies Now* (1990), *Beyond Belief* (1998) and *Half a Life* (2001).
Quotes
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“The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.”
“At school I had only admirers; I had no friends.”
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“As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.”
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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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“I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.”
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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 begi...”
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“Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will - with luck - come to me during the actual writing, and it wil...”
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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 being, and only for the time being - to live...”
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“The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.”
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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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“My life is short. I can't listen to banality.”
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“Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.”
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“My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.”
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“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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“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 to do things with the material, to dramati...”
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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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“Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.”
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“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 coul...”
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“Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.”
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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 wha...”
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