I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
V.S. NAIPAULEach book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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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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The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.
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Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.
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As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother’s house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.
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I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.
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Small things start us in new ways of thinking.
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The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.
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All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.
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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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If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
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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.
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In the beginning, before the arrival of the white men, I had considered myself neutral. I had wanted neither side to win, neither the army nor the rebels. As it turned out, both sides lost.
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An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
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If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.
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The writer is all alone.
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I don’t feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
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Writing has to support itself.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I’m thought to be a tough writer, but I’m really a softie.
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Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
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The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves.
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I’ve never abandoned the novel.
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All cultures have been mingled forever.
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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