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" 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
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" My life is short. I can't listen to banality. "
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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
" The writer is all alone. "
V. S. Naipaul
Alone
Writer
" I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading. "
V. S. Naipaul
People
Writer
Reading
" Writing has to support itself. "
V. S. Naipaul
Itself
Support
Writing
" An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally. "
V. S. Naipaul
Autobiography
Facts
Never
" 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
" If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead. "
V. S. Naipaul
Writer
Hostility
He
" I'm very content. "
V. S. Naipaul
Content
Very
" At school I had only admirers; I had no friends. "
V. S. Naipaul
Had
Friends
School
" If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing. "
V. S. Naipaul
Talk
Writing
Oppression
" 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
" 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
" Great writing can be done in biography, history, art. "
V. S. Naipaul
Art
Done
Great
" Nothing was made in Trinidad. "
V. S. Naipaul
Nothing
Made
" 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
" I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading. "
V. S. Naipaul
I Am
People
Kind
" Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society. "
V. S. Naipaul
Society
Simple
Complex
" 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. "
V. S. Naipaul
You
Talk
Name
" 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
" I've been a free man. "
V. S. Naipaul
Been
Free Man
Free
" Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it's complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he's able to keep processing that as well. "
V. S. Naipaul
Childhood
Life
Well
" I've never abandoned the novel. "
V. S. Naipaul
Abandoned
Novel
Never
" 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
" 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
" One isn't born one's self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people's ideas - and you have to work through it all. "
V. S. Naipaul
Self
Expectations
Ideas
" 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
" 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
" 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
" It's very attractive to people to be a victim. Instead of having to think out the whole situation, about history and your group and what you are doing... if you begin from the point of view of being a victim, you've got it half-made. I mean intellectually. "
V. S. Naipaul
View
History
Group