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I never formulated the idea of the universal civilization until 11 years ago, when I traveled for many months in a number of non-Arab Muslim countries — Iran, Indonesia, Malaysia and Pakistan — to try to understand what had driven them to their rage.

— V. S. Naipaul Our Universal Civilization (1990)

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More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

A writer is in the end not his books, but his myth. And that myth is in the keeping of others.

Steinbeck in Monterey (1970)

What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good.

Reading and Writing : A Personal Account (2000)

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.

The time before Islam is a time of blackness: that is part of Muslim theology. History has to serve theology.”

Among the Believers (1981)

If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.

All V. S. Naipaul quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: V. S. Naipaul (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.