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. NAIPAULThat 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.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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It is important not to trust people too much.
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You can’t deny what you’ve learned; you can’t deny your travels; you can’t deny the nature of your life.
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I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.
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Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it’s complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he’s able to keep processing that as well.
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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
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I will say I am the sum of my books.
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Home is, I suppose just a child’s idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.
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The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.
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Making a book is such a big enterprise.
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I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.
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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.
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Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
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Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn’t fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will – with luck – come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise
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The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
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An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
V.S. NAIPAUL