V. S. Naipaul Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• 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

  Ideas, Years, Intuition

  V. S. Naipaul (2012). “Literary Occasions: Essays”, p.189, Pan Macmillan

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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.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Strong, Writing, Masters

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• I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Eye, People, Needs

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• I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Thinking, Quality, Wonderful

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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.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Book, Past, Long

  "V.S. Naipaul in Search of Himself: A Conversation" with Mel Gussow, "The New York Times", April 24, 1994.

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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

  V. S. Naipaul

  Book, Writing, Luck

  V. S. Naipaul (2012). “Literary Occasions: Essays”, p.188, Pan Macmillan

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• What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And- though played out forms can throw up miraculous sports like The Importance of Being Earnest or Decline and Fall- what is good is always what is new, in both form and content. What is good forgets whatever models it might have had, and is unexpected; we have to catch it on the wing.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Sports, Fall, What Matters

  V.S. Naipaul (2010). “Literary Occasions: Essays”, p.55, Vintage

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• A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Taken, Civilization, Dying

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• To read a newspaper for the first time is like coming into a film that has been on for an hour. Newspapers are like serials. To understand them you have to take knowledge to them; the knowledge that serves best is the knowledge provided by the newspaper itself.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Firsts, Film, Hours

  V.S. Naipaul (2011). “The Enigma of Arrival”, p.133, Vintage

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• 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

  Reading, People, Giving

  V. S. Naipaul (2012). “Literary Occasions: Essays”, p.188, Pan Macmillan

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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.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Years, Year End, Political

  V.S. Naipaul (2010). “The Writer and the World: Essays”, p.490, Vintage

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• In England I am not English, in India I am not Indian. I am chained to the 1,000 square miles that is Trinidad; but I will evade that fate yet.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Fate, Squares, India

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• It isn't that there's no right and wrong here. There's no right.

  V. S. Naipaul

  V. S. Naipaul (2012). “A Bend in the River”, p.60, Pan Macmillan

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• A businessman is someone who buys at ten and is happy to get out at twelve. The other kind of man buys at ten, sees it rise to eighteen and does nothing. He is waiting for it to rise to twenty. When it drops to two he waits for it to get back to ten.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Men, Two, Waiting

  V. S. Naipaul (2012). “A Bend in the River”, p.18, Pan Macmillan

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• My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Grief, Dirty, Book

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• A cat only has itself.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Cat

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• If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Writing, Littles, Narrative

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• In Trinidad, where as new arrivals we were a disadvantaged community, that excluding idea was a kind of protection; it enabled us - for the time being, and only for the time being - to live in our own way and according to our own rules, to live in our own fading India.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Ideas, Community, India

  V.S. Naipaul (2010). “Literary Occasions: Essays”, p.239, Vintage

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• Africa has no future.

  V. S. Naipaul

  "A singular writer" by Maya Jaggi, www.theguardian.com. September 7, 2001.

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• How could people like these, without words to put to their emotions and passions, manage? They could, at best, only suffer dumbly. Their pains and humiliations would work themselves out in their characters alone: like evil spirits possessing a body, so that the body itself might appear innocent of what it did.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Pain, Passion, Character

  V. S. Naipaul (2012). “The Enigma of Arrival: A Novel in Five Sections”, p.27, Pan Macmillan

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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.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Book, Careers, Poetry

  V. S. Naipaul (2012). “Literary Occasions: Essays”, p.190, Pan Macmillan

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• 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

  Army, Winning, Men

  V. S. Naipaul (2012). “A Bend in the River”, p.52, Pan Macmillan

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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.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Childhood, Goes On, Able

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• If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Writing, Oppression, Ifs

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• The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Cities, British, Estates

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