“Life is a helluva thing. You can see trouble coming and you can’t do a damn thing to prevent it coming. You just gotta sit and watch and wait.” From Miguel Street, by VS Naipaul
There is perhaps no greater mark of a writer’s genius that you cannot read him through his words: anyone who ever heard, saw, or watched V S Naipaul engage in the real world will find this throwaway philosophical aside on life entirely alien to their experience of the man who was famously precise, pitiless, and impatient. Yet, that same experience of the man makes the words inescapably his: economical, deeply weighted, deceptively simple.
