The reason is that they define how I hav... by V. S. Naipaul

Now Novelist Literature Business Writing

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

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

Writing Will Life

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

People

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

Thinking Father Nothing People

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

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

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

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