Literary Birthday – 17 August – V.S. Naipaul

V. S. Naipaul was born 17 August 1932 and died 11 August 2018.

Seven Classic Naipaul Quotes

An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn’t know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.
Life doesn’t have a neat beginning and a tidy end, life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should be all there.
I’m the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.

V. S. Naipaul was a Trinidadian-British writer of Indo-Trinidadian heritage. He was best known for his novels focusing on the legacy of the British Empire’s colonialism. In 2001, Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. His novels include A House For Mr Biswas and A Bend in the River.

Source for Image: UK National Archive Catalogue Reference: INF 10/354/12, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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