V. S. Naipaul
V. S. Naipaul
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, TC, is a Trinidadian Nobel Prize-winning British writer known for his comic early novels set in Trinidad and Tobago, his bleaker later novels of the wider world, and his autobiographical chronicles of life and travels. He has published more than 30 books, both of fiction and nonfiction, over some 50 years...
NationalityTrinidadian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth17 August 1932
book gone fiction
Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.
book writing luck
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
book careers poetry
I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.
book bigs enterprise
Making a book is such a big enterprise.
book writing ends
Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
grief dirty book
My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.
book past long
To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn't know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.
book values
But everything of value about me is in my books.
book
I will say I am the sum of my books.
knowledge
I read many things. I read to fill in my knowledge of the world.
certain chance explore felt fictional force form gave life nonfiction spend
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.
areas ideology
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.
years year-end community
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.
men sorrow victory
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