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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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V. S. Naipaul
Died: 2018
Died: August 11
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
V.S. Naipaul
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
Written
Stumble
Wish
Describing
Ever
Transparent
Look
Prose
Looks
Goodness
Writing
Failure
Would
Reader
Saying
Nicely

More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

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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.
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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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My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.
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When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.
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Writers should provoke disagreement.
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There are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to.
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If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
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I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
V. S. Naipaul
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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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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.
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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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I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie.
V. S. Naipaul
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We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
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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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
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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
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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
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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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Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.
V. S. Naipaul
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Africa has no future.
V. S. Naipaul