If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing. — V. S. Naipaul Copy Share Image
Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives. — V. S. Naipaul Copy Share Image
I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. — V. S. Naipaul Copy Share Image
The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness. — V. S. Naipaul Copy Share Image
An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally. — V. S. Naipaul Copy Share Image
Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it's complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he's able… — V. S. Naipaul Copy Share Image
My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world. — V. S. Naipaul Copy Share Image
Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background. — V. S. Naipaul Copy Share Image
I really wasn't equipped to be a writer when I left Oxford. But then I set out to learn. I've always had… — V. S. Naipaul Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this… — V. S. Naipaul Copy Share Image
If a man begins writing at thirty, by the time he is fifty or sixty, the bulk of his work has been… — V. S. Naipaul Copy Share Image
All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of… — V. S. Naipaul Copy Share Image
The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at… — V. S. Naipaul Copy Share Image
Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the… — V. S. Naipaul Copy Share Image
To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if… — V. S. Naipaul Copy Share Image
One is made by all the things around one. There are many things that have made one. For a writer to go… — V. S. Naipaul Copy Share Image
To be a writer you have to be out in the world, you have to risk yourself in the world, you have… — V. S. Naipaul Copy Share Image
What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material. And the fictional… — V. S. Naipaul Copy Share Image
I wish my prose to be transparentI don't want the reader to stumble over me; I want him to look through what… — V. S. Naipaul Copy Share Image
My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all… — V. S. Naipaul Copy Share Image
That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am… — V. S. Naipaul Copy Share Image
In Trinidad, where as new arrivals we were a disadvantaged community, that excluding idea was a kind of protection; it enabled us - for… — V. S. Naipaul Copy Share
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… — V. S. Naipaul Copy Share
To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask… — V. S. Naipaul Copy Share
In our island myth this was the prescribed end of marriages like mine: the wife goes off with someone from the Cercle Sportif, outside… — V. S. Naipaul Copy Share
In the beginning, before the arrival of the white men, I had considered myself neutral. I had wanted neither side to win, neither the… — V. S. Naipaul Copy Share
The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves. — V. S. Naipaul Copy Share
I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea. — V. S. Naipaul Copy Share
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 Copy Share
