Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms, break the forms. "
V. S. Naipaul
Ready
Serious
Want
Related Quotes:
" An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally. "
V. S. Naipaul
Autobiography
Facts
Never
" A cat only has itself. "
V. S. Naipaul
Cat
Only
Itself
" I went to India and met some people who had been involved in this guerrilla business, middle-class people who were rather vain and foolish. There was no revolutionary grandeur to it. Nothing. "
V. S. Naipaul
Business
People
Some People
" 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
" I have a very small public. "
V. S. Naipaul
Very
Public
Small
" What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude. "
V. S. Naipaul
Suppose
Attitude
Past
" 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
" My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world. "
V. S. Naipaul
Grief
Writing
Dirty
" Writers should provoke disagreement. "
V. S. Naipaul
Writers
Should
Disagreement
" 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
Me
" A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying. "
V. S. Naipaul
Over
Dying
Said
" Writing has to support itself. "
V. S. Naipaul
Itself
Support
Writing
" 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
" We made no inquiries about India or about the families people had left behind. When our ways of thinking had changed, and we wished to know, it was too late. I know nothing of the people on my father's side; I know only that some of them came from Nepal. "
V. S. Naipaul
Know
Late
Thinking
" 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 culture. It's a form of aggression. "
V. S. Naipaul
Country
You
Aggression
" I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people. "
V. S. Naipaul
Feel
Speak
People
" Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe. "
V. S. Naipaul
House
Place
Child
" If a man begins writing at thirty, by the time he is fifty or sixty, the bulk of his work has been done. By the time he is eighty, he's got nothing more, you know? "
V. S. Naipaul
Work
Know
Time
" 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. "
V. S. Naipaul
Know
You
Think
" The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it. "
V. S. Naipaul
Place
Become
Men
" I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness. "
V. S. Naipaul
Think
Still
Mine
" 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. "
V. S. Naipaul
Start
Understand
Will
" I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands. "
V. S. Naipaul
Come
Always
Who
" 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
" I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time. "
V. S. Naipaul
Letting
You
Time
" I'm very content. "
V. S. Naipaul
Content
Very
" In England people are very proud of being very stupid. "
V. S. Naipaul
Stupid
Proud
People
" 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
" 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. "
V. S. Naipaul
Paths
Good
Heart
" If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead. "
V. S. Naipaul
Writer
Hostility
He