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.
V.S. NAIPAULOne 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.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.
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In England people are very proud of being very stupid.
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I’m thought to be a tough writer, but I’m really a softie.
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I will say I am the sum of my books.
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One must always try to see the truth of a situation – it makes things universal.
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Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
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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.
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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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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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But everything of value about me is in my books.
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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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Home is, I suppose just a child’s idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.
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It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.
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If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.
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One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
V.S. NAIPAUL