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All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.
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
Remain
However
Mystery
Quirks
Amount
Documentation
Take
Friendships
Writing
Laid
Life
Fascinating
Details
More quotes by V. S. Naipaul
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.
V. S. Naipaul
Africa has no future.
V. S. Naipaul
You can't deny what you've learned you can't deny your travels you can't deny the nature of your life.
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
In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
V. S. Naipaul
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.
V. S. Naipaul
A cat only has itself.
V. S. Naipaul
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
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
V. S. Naipaul
Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.
V. S. Naipaul
To read a newspaper for the first time is like coming into a film that has been on for an hour. Newspapers are like serials. To understand them you have to take knowledge to them the knowledge that serves best is the knowledge provided by the newspaper itself.
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
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
What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.
V. S. Naipaul
People come and go all the time the world has always been in movement.
V. S. Naipaul
The writer is all alone.
V. S. Naipaul
The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
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
The world is what it is men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
V. S. Naipaul
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.
V. S. Naipaul