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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.

V.S. Naipaul

In the beginning, before the arrival of the white men, I had considered myself neutral. I had wanted neither side to win, neither the army nor the rebels. As it turned out, both sides lost.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Beginning Lost Man Myself Side White Win
My life is short. I can’t listen to banality.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Life Listening Myself
I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Alone Guidance Ideas Intuition Politics System
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

Beginning Community Death End Life Myself Politics
It has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say ‘my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn’t matter’.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Affect Calm Destroy Existence History Myself Past People
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
An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Fact Fiction Lying Writing
One must always try to see the truth of a situation – it makes things universal.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Oneself Situation Truth Universe
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.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Beyond Children Home Myself World
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
I’m thought to be a tough writer, but I’m really a softie.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Myself Personality Soft Thinking Tough 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
There are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Easy Light Myself Name Talk Way
I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Books Career Feeling Myself
The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Darkness Existence Kind World
But everything of value about me is in my books.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Books Myself Value

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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