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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
Wish
Describing
Ever
Transparent
Look
Prose
Looks
Goodness
Writing
Failure
Would
Reader
Saying
Nicely
Written
Stumble

More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

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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.
V. S. Naipaul
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I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
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Some lesser husbands built a latrine on the hillside.
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All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.
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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.
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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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Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
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You can't deny what you've learned you can't deny your travels you can't deny the nature of your life.
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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.
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If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.
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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.
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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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I'm my own writer. My material means I'm entirely separate.
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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Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
V. S. Naipaul
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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
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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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Writing has to support itself.
V. S. Naipaul
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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
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The writer is all alone.
V. S. Naipaul