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" An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally. "
V. S. Naipaul
Autobiography
Facts
Never
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" The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate. "
V. S. Naipaul
City
British
Council
" 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
Writing
Details
Life
" What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material. And the fictional form was going to force you to do things with the material, to dramatize it in a certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to explore the world, the other world, the world that one didn't know fully. "
V. S. Naipaul
Writing
World
Thought
" There are certain things that are too painful for people to even write about sometimes, and there are certain things that are too hard to read about again. "
V. S. Naipaul
Write
Sometimes
People
" 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
Business
Writing
Turn
" How can you be an atheist and have an ideology to go with it? To be an atheist is to be free of some areas of belief. I don't see how that can become an ideology. "
V. S. Naipaul
See
Atheist
Become
" Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand. "
V. S. Naipaul
Kicked
Thing
Only
" A cat only has itself. "
V. S. Naipaul
Cat
Only
Itself
" 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
Writing
Within
Two
" Africa has no future. "
V. S. Naipaul
Future
No Future
Africa
" 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
Editor
She
Good
" My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world. "
V. S. Naipaul
Grief
Writing
Dirty
" If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris. "
V. S. Naipaul
You
Intellectual
Go
" The longer I live the more convinced I become that one of the greatest honors we can confer on other people is to see them as they are, to recognize not only that they exist, but that they exist in specific ways and have specific realities. "
V. S. Naipaul
See
More
Live
" If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing. "
V. S. Naipaul
Talk
Writing
Oppression
" To be a writer you have to be out in the world, you have to risk yourself in the world, you have to be immersed in the world, you have to go out looking for it. This becomes harder as you get older because there's less energy, the days are shorter for older people and it's not so easy to go out and immerse oneself in the world outside. "
V. S. Naipaul
Looking
Energy
People
" Great writing can be done in biography, history, art. "
V. S. Naipaul
Art
Done
Great
" My life is short. I can't listen to banality. "
V. S. Naipaul
Short
Life
My Life
" I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred. "
V. S. Naipaul
Father
Beyond
Mother
" If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms, break the forms. "
V. S. Naipaul
Ready
Serious
Want
" Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society. "
V. S. Naipaul
Society
Simple
Complex
" That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which is never an easy thing to do. "
V. S. Naipaul
I Am
Judging
Look
" Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will - with luck - come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise. "
V. S. Naipaul
Luck
I Am
Moment
" In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon. "
V. S. Naipaul
Become
Reputation
Way
" Argentine political life is like the life of an ant community or an African forest tribe: full of events, full of crisis and deaths, but life is always cyclical, and the year ends as it begins. "
V. S. Naipaul
Year
Political
Life
" You need someone to see what you've done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what's gone into it. "
V. S. Naipaul
Need
You
Appreciate
" As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are. "
V. S. Naipaul
Children
Child
World
" 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
Feel
Career
Said
" Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background. "
V. S. Naipaul
Write
Always
Background
" I became very interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery. "
V. S. Naipaul
Thought
Roots
Questions