Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.
V.S. NAIPAULThe first 50 years of the cinema were absolutely great years. Original minds were at work establishing the ways to tell a story. And what is happening now is a copying, a pastiche-ing of what was done by great men.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
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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.
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Small things start us in new ways of thinking.
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The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
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Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
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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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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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It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That’s where the mischief starts. That’s where everything starts unravelling.
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I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.
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After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
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I don’t feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
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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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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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Making a book is such a big enterprise.
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If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.
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