V. S. Naipaul Quotes
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The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.
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Nothing was made in Trinidad.
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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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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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Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. 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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There are certain things that are too painful for people to even write about sometimes, and there are certain things that are too hard to read about again.
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I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
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But everything of value about me is in my books.
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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.
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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?
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In England people are very proud of being very stupid.
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I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
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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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If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms, break the forms.
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I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
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I could scarcely bear to look at her eyes. They promised such intimacies.
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I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands.
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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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Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
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Making a book is such a big enterprise.
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To be a writer you have to be out in the world, you have to risk yourself in the world, you have to be immersed in the world, you have to go out looking for it. This becomes harder as you get older because there's less energy, the days are shorter for older people and it's not so easy to go out and immerse oneself in the world outside.
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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.'
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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.
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Life 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.