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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.

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
Editors
Feminine
Became
Writer
Taster
Good
Publisher
Behold
Editor
Publishers

More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

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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.
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We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
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The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
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One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
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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.
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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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I wish my prose to be transparent—I 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.
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One must always try to see the truth of a situation - it makes things universal.
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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.
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Men need history it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart it is enough that there is something there.
V. S. Naipaul
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The writer is all alone.
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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
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Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.
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I came to London. It had become the center of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost.
V. S. Naipaul
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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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Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.
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The past has to be seen to be dead or the past will kill.
V. S. Naipaul
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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.
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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
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I will say I am the sum of my books.
V. S. Naipaul