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. 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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The writer is all alone.
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Writing has to support itself.
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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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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 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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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 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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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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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
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It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.
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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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Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
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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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People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.
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My life is short. I can’t listen to banality.
V.S. NAIPAUL