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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.

V.S. Naipaul

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Man Place World Worth
To 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.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Book Day Myself Past Writing
All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Father Reading Right Story
I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Ancestor Family Father Mom Myself
If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Oppression Sit Talk Writing
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. NAIPAUL

City Goodness Heart Lost Path Place Separate Unknown
If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Creation Death Writing
Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Fiction Growth Intuition
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

Discover Interest Question Religion Simplicity Thinking
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

Ideas Intuition Myself Start Trust Understand Writing
If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Fake Intellectual Mistake Quantity Travel Yourself
I’m my own writer. My material means I’m entirely separate.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Material Myself Separate Writing
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.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Lecture Myself People Reading True
I still think it’s really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Myself Quality Quite Reading Thinking Wonderful
One must always try to see the truth of a situation – it makes things universal.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Oneself Situation Truth Universe
All cultures have been mingled forever.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Culture Forever One Liner

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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