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

V.S. Naipaul

Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Appearance Clothes Dangerous Ignorance People
All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Father Reading Right Story
Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Act Judgement Try Understand Wisdom
I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Ideas Intuition Myself Start Trust Understand Writing
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

Establishment Greatness Imitation Man Mindset Movie Original Story Time
If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Creation Death Writing
I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Alone Guidance Ideas Intuition Politics System
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.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Beginning Community Death End Life Myself Politics
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.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Beginning Business Intuition Myself Reason
But everything of value about me is in my books.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Books Myself Value
I will say I am the sum of my books.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Books Myself
Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Fiction Growth Intuition
The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Darkness Existence Kind World
After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Ideas Ourselves Possible
It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Answer Philosophy Right Wrong
It has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. 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

Affect Calm Destroy Existence History Myself Past People

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

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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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Popular Authors

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