The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness. V. S. Naipaul More Quotes by V. S. Naipaul More Quotes From V. S. Naipaul And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of victory fills a moment and then is over V. S. Naipaul victory sorrow men I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie. V. S. Naipaul tough 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 views mean thinking It has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. 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 doe culture past 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 reading giving people Out of its squalor and human decay, its eruptions of butchery, India produced so many people of grace and beauty, ruled by elaborate courtesy. Producing too much life, it denied the value of life; yet it permitted a unique human development to so many. Nowhere were people so heightened, rounded and individualistic; nowhere did they offer themselves so fully and with such assurance. To know Indians was to take a delight in people as people; every encounter was an adventure. I did not want India to sink [out of my memory]; the mere thought was painful. V. S. Naipaul unique adventure memories 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 writing book We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves. V. S. Naipaul traits stranger sometimes Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two. V. S. Naipaul two people interesting The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing. V. S. Naipaul kind darkness world 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 intuition years ideas Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there. V. S. Naipaul heart men ideas But everything of value about me is in my books. V. S. Naipaul values book 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-end political years 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 judging writing looks Small things start us in new ways of thinking V. S. Naipaul small-things way thinking If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing. V. S. Naipaul oppression ifs writing Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes. V. S. Naipaul clothes oil america What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And- though played out forms can throw up miraculous sports like The Importance of Being Earnest or Decline and Fall- what is good is always what is new, in both form and content. What is good forgets whatever models it might have had, and is unexpected; we have to catch it on the wing. V. S. Naipaul what-matters sports fall Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. V. S. Naipaul gone book fiction
