If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.
V.S. NAIPAULJudgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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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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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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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 became very interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery.
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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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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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If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
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I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
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People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.
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The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
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The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.
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Small things start us in new ways of thinking.
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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 writer is all alone.
V.S. NAIPAUL