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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

The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Death Kill Past See
Life doesn’t have a neat beginning and a tidy end; life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should be all there.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Beginning End Life Yourself
Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Enough History Ideas Man Need
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
The 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.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Confidence Family Fight Ideas Important Law Respect Society
One must always try to see the truth of a situation – it makes things universal.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Oneself Situation Truth Universe
Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Appearance Clothes Dangerous Ignorance People
It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Answer Philosophy Right Wrong
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
Life is a helluva thing. You can see trouble coming and you can’t do a damn thing to prevent it coming. You just got to sit and watch and wait.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Hell Life Patience Prevent Trouble Wait Yourself
After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Ideas Ourselves Possible
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
If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.
V.S. NAIPAUL

Creation Death Writing
In England people are very proud of being very stupid.
V.S. NAIPAUL

People Proud Stupidity
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
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

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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