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. 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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After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
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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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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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The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
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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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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.
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I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.
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You need someone to see what you’ve done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what’s gone into it.
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Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
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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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An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
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If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don’t express your disregard for the essence of the culture. It’s a form of aggression.
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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 profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
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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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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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The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
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The world is always in movement.
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I’m my own writer. My material means I’m entirely separate.
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Making a book is such a big enterprise.
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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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My life is short. I can’t listen to banality.
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Writers should provoke disagreement.
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Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.
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The writer is all alone.
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It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.
V.S. NAIPAUL