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Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.
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
Backgrounds
Whenever
Fiction
Write
Character
Writing
Roughly
Always
Invent
Background
More quotes by 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
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
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
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
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
The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid people and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and common.
V. S. Naipaul
Africa has no future.
V. S. Naipaul
I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
V. S. Naipaul
The past has to be seen to be dead or the past will kill.
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
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 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.
V. S. Naipaul
A cat only has itself.
V. S. Naipaul
Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
V. S. Naipaul
Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.
V. S. Naipaul
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
V. S. Naipaul
Africa is not a fun place, you know. A fun place is somewhere that lifts the spirits, that cossets the senses. I don't think that can be said of the Africa I traveled in.
V. S. Naipaul
The writer is all alone.
V. S. Naipaul
All cultures have been mingled forever.
V. S. Naipaul
If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don't express your disregard for the essence of the culture. It's a form of aggression.
V. S. Naipaul
