I will say I am the sum of my books.
V.S. NAIPAULThe 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.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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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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Writing has to support itself.
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It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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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If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.
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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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One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
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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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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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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
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Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
V.S. NAIPAUL