You need someone to see what you’ve done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what’s gone into it.
V.S. NAIPAULTo this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn’t know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
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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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One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
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If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
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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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The family feuds or the village feuds often had to do with an idea of honor. Perhaps it was a peasant idea; perhaps this idea of honor is especially important to a society without recourse to law or without confidence in law.
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In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
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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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A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
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I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
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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’m my own writer. My material means I’m entirely separate.
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Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
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Life doesn’t have a neat beginning and a tidy end; life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should be all there.
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The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
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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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Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
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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.
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But everything of value about me is in my books.
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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.
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The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.
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His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.
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I still think it’s really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.
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Argentine political life is like the life of an ant community or an African forest tribe: full of events, full of crisis and deaths, but life is always cyclical, and the year ends as it begins.
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The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
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We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
V.S. NAIPAUL