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"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."
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Exlpore more Writing quotes
"Writing. Is it a way to be remembered,or a need to become immortal?"
"I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine."
"Between the lines of every book the writer reveals their own secrets."
"My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward."
"I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking, which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling."
"Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open."
"A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual."
"Scotland consistently produces world-class writers."
Explore more quotes by V. S. Naipaul
"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."
"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."
"The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it."
"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."
"As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are."
"I came to London. It had become the center of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost."
"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."
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