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If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms, break the forms.
V. S. Naipaul -
I've never abandoned the novel.
V. S. Naipaul
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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 -
I became very interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery.
V. S. Naipaul -
India is for me a difficult country. It isn’t my home and cannot be my home; and yet I cannot reject it or be indifferent to it; I cannot travel only for the sights. I am at once too close and too far.
V. S. Naipaul -
In England people are very proud of being very stupid.
V. S. Naipaul -
We made no inquiries about India or about the families people had left behind. When our ways of thinking had changed, and we wished to know, it was too late. I know nothing of the people on my father's side; I know only that some of them came from Nepal.
V. S. Naipaul -
One is made by all the things around one. There are many things that have made one. For a writer to go around looking for things that have made him is asking for trouble. It's like giving a character to yourself. Can't do it. Can't do it. These things are just there. Is that enough?
V. S. Naipaul
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Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
V. S. Naipaul -
I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
V. S. Naipaul -
I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
V. S. Naipaul -
Making a book is such a big enterprise.
V. S. Naipaul -
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 -
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.
V. S. Naipaul
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Nothing was made in Trinidad.
V. S. Naipaul -
I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
V. S. Naipaul -
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 -
I could scarcely bear to look at her eyes. They promised such intimacies.
V. S. Naipaul -
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 -
I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.
V. S. Naipaul
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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 -
I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands.
V. S. Naipaul -
And whenever I saw Luis, Graça's husband, I dealt with him with a friendship that was quite genuine, since it was offered out of gratitude for Graça's love.
V. S. Naipaul -
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.
V. S. Naipaul