An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
V.S. NAIPAULLife 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.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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The world is always in movement.
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In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
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I’m my own writer. My material means I’m entirely separate.
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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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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
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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.
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We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
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One 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.
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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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I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.
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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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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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His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.
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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.
V.S. NAIPAUL