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" 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

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" I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness. "

" 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. "

" I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. "

" If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing. "

" In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon. "

" It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I'm very content. "

V. S. Naipaul

Content

Very

" 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. "

" 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. "

" But everything of value about me is in my books. "

V. S. Naipaul

Books

About

" The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate. "

" Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe. "

" I have a very small public. "

" 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

Strength

Day

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

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

V. S. Naipaul

Writer

Hostility

" The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it. "

" A cat only has itself. "

" 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. "

" There are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to. "

" In Trinidad, where as new arrivals we were a disadvantaged community, that excluding idea was a kind of protection; it enabled us - for the time being, and only for the time being - to live in our own way and according to our own rules, to live in our own fading India. "

" One is made by all the things around one. There are many things that have made one. For a writer to go around looking for things that have made him is asking for trouble. It's like giving a character to yourself. Can't do it. Can't do it. These things are just there. Is that enough? "

V. S. Naipaul

Yourself

Giving

" I will say I am the sum of my books. "

V. S. Naipaul

Will

Books