It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut.
V.S. NAIPAULThe writer is all alone.
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
V.S. NAIPAUL -
The world is always in movement.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
But everything of value about me is in my books.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
I’ve never abandoned the novel.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
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 -
When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
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.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
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. NAIPAUL -
The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid people; and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and common.
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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.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
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.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
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.
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.
V.S. NAIPAUL