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Writers should provoke disagreement.

V. S. Naipaul

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V. S. Naipaul
Died: 2018
Died: August 11
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
V.S. Naipaul
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
Provoke
Disagreement
Provoking
Writers

More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

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My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.
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One must always try to see the truth of a situation - it makes things universal.
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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.
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You need someone to see what you've done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what's gone into it.
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All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.
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I will say I am the sum of my books.
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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.
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What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.
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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've never abandoned the novel.
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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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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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I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie.
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The past has to be seen to be dead or the past will kill.
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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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My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh.
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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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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
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The 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.
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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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