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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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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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The world is always in movement.
V. S. Naipaul
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If it was Europe that gave us on the coast some idea of our history, it was Europe, I feel, that also introduced us to the lie.
V. S. Naipaul
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I've never abandoned the novel.
V. S. Naipaul
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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.
V. S. Naipaul
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Small things start us in new ways of thinking
V. S. Naipaul
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It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut.
V. S. Naipaul
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I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.
V. S. Naipaul
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The world is what it is men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
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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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
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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
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I had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment.
V. S. Naipaul
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Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
V. S. Naipaul
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One must always try to see the truth of a situation - it makes things universal.
V. S. Naipaul
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Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
V. S. Naipaul
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That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which is never an easy thing to do.
V. S. Naipaul
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If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.
V. S. Naipaul
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I've been a free man.
V. S. Naipaul
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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.
V. S. Naipaul