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I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people’s lands.

V.S. Naipaul

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
It’s very attractive to people to be a victim. Instead of having to think out the whole situation, about history and your group and what you are doing. If you begin from the point of view of being a victim, you’ve got it half-made. I mean intellectually.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Attraction Beginning Group History Intellectual Myself People Victim
Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Book End Live Writing
Life is a helluva thing. You can see trouble coming and you can’t do a damn thing to prevent it coming. You just got to sit and watch and wait.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Hell Life Patience Prevent Trouble Wait Yourself
I’ve never abandoned the novel.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Abandonment Myself Novel
Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Interest People Time
If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Creation Death Writing
This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Lecture Myself People Reading True
In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Myself Reputation Way
That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing – which is never an easy thing to do.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Easy Element Myself Surprise Writing
There are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Easy Light Myself Name Talk Way
The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Death Kill Past See
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
And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of victory fills a moment and then is over.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Death Man Moments Myself Sadness Sorrow Strange Victory
All cultures have been mingled forever.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Culture Forever One Liner
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

I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people’s lands.

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I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people’s lands.

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Popular Authors

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