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Writer Quotes by V. S. Naipaul

21 Writer quotes by V. S. Naipaul

All Writer quotes V. S. Naipaul’s page

When you need a clear‑cut view of a writer’s relationship with the world, V. S. Naipaul’s twenty‑one quotes deliver. His commentary cuts to the bone, mixing personal conviction with a keen eye for cultural nuance, offering readers a concise yet powerful portrait of his thinking about the act of writing.

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The writer is all alone.

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Writing has to support itself.

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Making a book is such a big enterprise.

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Writers should provoke disagreement.

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I will say I am the sum of my books.

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Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.

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I'm my own writer. My material means I'm entirely separate.

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

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If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.

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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…

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An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.

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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…

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I really wasn't equipped to be a writer when I left Oxford. But then I set out to learn. I've always had…

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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…

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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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All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of…

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What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material. And the fictional…

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I wish my prose to be transparentI don't want the reader to stumble over me; I want him to look through what…

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To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if…

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To be a writer you have to be out in the world, you have to risk yourself in the world, you have…

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One is made by all the things around one. There are many things that have made one. For a writer to go…

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More by V. S. Naipaul

In Trinidad, where as new arrivals we were a disadvantaged community, that excluding idea was a kind of protection; it enabled us - for…

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Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.

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My life is short. I can't listen to banality.

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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…

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I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people.

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To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask…

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The world is always in movement.

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At school I had only admirers; I had no friends.

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I'm very content.

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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…

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In the beginning, before the arrival of the white men, I had considered myself neutral. I had wanted neither side to win, neither the…

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I'm my own writer. My material means I'm entirely separate.

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