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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
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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
Littles
Little
Weave
Writing
Account
Narrative
Accounts
Novel
Alone
Write
More quotes by V. S. Naipaul
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
Some lesser husbands built a latrine on the hillside.
V. S. Naipaul
I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
V. S. Naipaul
A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
V. S. Naipaul
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
I really wasn't equipped to be a writer when I left Oxford. But then I set out to learn. I've always had the highest regard for the craft. I've always felt it was work.
V. S. Naipaul
In our island myth this was the prescribed end of marriages like mine: the wife goes off with someone from the Cercle Sportif, outside whose gates at night the willingly betrayed husband waits in his motorcar. The circumstances were slightly.
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
The world is always in movement.
V. S. Naipaul
I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie.
V. S. Naipaul
One isn’t born one’s self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people’s ideas – and you have to work through it all.
V. S. Naipaul
I have a very small public.
V. S. Naipaul
The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves.
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
Writing has to support itself.
V. S. Naipaul
It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling.
V. S. Naipaul
Life is a helluva thing. You can see trouble coming and you can't do a damn thing to prevent it coming. You just got to sit and watch and wait.
V. S. Naipaul
The family feuds or the village feuds often had to do with an idea of honor. Perhaps it was a peasant idea perhaps this idea of honor is especially important to a society without recourse to law or without confidence in law.
V. S. Naipaul
All cultures have been mingled forever.
V. S. Naipaul
I wish my prose to be transparentI don't want the reader to stumble over me I want him to look through what I'm saying to what I'm describing. I don't want him ever to say, Oh, goodness, how nicely written this is. That would be a failure.
V. S. Naipaul
