V. S. Naipaul
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"Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul", Trinity Cross/TC, is a Trinidad-born Nobel Prize in Literature/Nobel Prize-winning United Kingdom/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 death in 1996. She served as first reader, editor, and critic of his writings. Naipaul dedicated his A House for Mr. Biswas to her. Naipaul married Nadira Naipaul, a former Pakistani journalist, in 1996.

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One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

201

It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest.

184

I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

169

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.

165

To read a newspaper for the first time is like coming into a film that has been on for an hour. Newspapers are like serials. To understand them you have to take knowledge to them; . . . best is the knowledge provided by the newspaper itself.

158

'It is mysterious that the ambition should have come first - the wish to be a writer, to have that distinction, that fame - and that this ambition should have come long before I could think of anything to write about.'

156

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

145

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.

120

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

115