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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

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
Moments
Fully
Book
Surprise
Come
Luck
Awaits
Take
Aware
Formed
Writing
Whatever
Extra
Moment
Extras
Given
Hardly
Next
Actual

More quotes by 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.
V. S. Naipaul
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I've been a free man.
V. S. Naipaul
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I'm my own writer. My material means I'm entirely separate.
V. S. Naipaul
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I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
V. S. Naipaul
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Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.
V. S. Naipaul
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The world outside existed in a kind of darkness and we inquired about nothing.
V. S. Naipaul
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Writing has to support itself.
V. S. Naipaul
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I will say I am the sum of my books.
V. S. Naipaul
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Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
V. S. Naipaul
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The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
V. S. Naipaul
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In the beginning, before the arrival of the white men, I had considered myself neutral. I had wanted neither side to win, neither the army nor the rebels. As it turned out, both sides lost.
V. S. Naipaul
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Nothing was made in Trinidad.
V. S. Naipaul
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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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Where jargon turns living issues into abstractions, and where jargon ends by competing with jargon, people don't have causes. They only have enemies.
V. S. Naipaul
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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.
V. S. Naipaul
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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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Writers should provoke disagreement.
V. S. Naipaul
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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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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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His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.
V. S. Naipaul