V. S. Naipaul Quotes

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V. S. Naipaul

Profession : Novelist

Birth : August 17, 1932

I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands.

V. S. Naipaul

Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.

V. S. Naipaul

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

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

What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.

V. S. Naipaul

Writers should provoke disagreement.

V. S. Naipaul

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

V. S. Naipaul

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

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

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

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

I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

V. S. Naipaul

This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true.

V. S. Naipaul

But everything of value about me is in my books.

V. S. Naipaul

The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.

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 have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.

V. S. Naipaul

I will say I am the sum of my books.

V. S. Naipaul

Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. 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

The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.

V. S. Naipaul