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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 the highest regard for the craft. I've always felt it was work. "
V. S. Naipaul
Work
Learn
Craft
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" I will say I am the sum of my books. "
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" A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying. "
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" The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing. "
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Darkness
Kind
" 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. "
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" The writer is all alone. "
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Writer
" 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
" To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter.' "
V. S. Naipaul
You
Culture
History
" All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right. "
V. S. Naipaul
Father
Things
Right
" 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
" 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
" 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
Unusual
True
People
" One must always try to see the truth of a situation - it makes things universal. "
V. S. Naipaul
See
Truth
Try
" Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand. "
V. S. Naipaul
Trying
Act
Judgment
" It is important not to trust people too much. "
V. S. Naipaul
Important
Too Much
Much
" 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
" Writing has to support itself. "
V. S. Naipaul
Itself
Support
Writing
" I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea. "
V. S. Naipaul
Political
Always
Intuition
" I've been a free man. "
V. S. Naipaul
Been
Free Man
Free
" I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading. "
V. S. Naipaul
I Am
People
Kind
" 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
" If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris. "
V. S. Naipaul
You
Intellectual
Go
" 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
Come
World
Lost
" I had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment. "
V. S. Naipaul
Man
Friends
Student
" I have a very small public. "
V. S. Naipaul
Very
Public
Small
" 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
" 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
" Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives. "
V. S. Naipaul
Books
Tend
Many
" 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
" 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
Go
" 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
Write
You
Narrative