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.
V.S. NAIPAULMost 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.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.
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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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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.
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Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
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Making a book is such a big enterprise.
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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.
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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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The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.
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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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You can’t deny what you’ve learned; you can’t deny your travels; you can’t deny the nature of your life.
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I’m my own writer. My material means I’m entirely separate.
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When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.
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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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It’s very attractive to people to be a victim. Instead of having to think out the whole situation, about history and your group and what you are doing. If you begin from the point of view of being a victim, you’ve got it half-made. I mean intellectually.
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Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
V.S. NAIPAUL