I have trusted to my intuition to find t... by V. S. Naipaul

Will Novelist Literature Years Idea

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

Other quotes by V. S. Naipaul

Life

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

Career

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

Books Will

I will say I am the sum of my books.

- V. S. Naipaul

Luck Writing Will

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

Writing

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

Time Being

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.

- V. S. Naipaul

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