“Writers should provoke disagreement.”
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Author detail
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul (17 August 1932 – 11 August 2018) was a Trinidadian-born British writer of works of fiction and nonfiction in English. He is known for his comic early novels set in Trinidad, his bleaker novels of alienation in the wider world, and his vigilant chronicles of life and travels. He published more than thirty books over fifty years. Naipaul's breakthrough novel *A House for Mr Biswas* was published in 1961. He won the Booker Prize in 1971 for his novel In a *Free State,* and the Jerusalem Prize in 1983. In 1990, he was awarded the Trinity Cross, Trinidad and Tobago's highest national honour. He received a knighthood in Britain in 1990, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. Some of his other works include *The Guerillas* (1975), *The Middle Passage* (1962) *A Bend in the River* (1979), *Among the Believers* (1981), *The Enigma of Arrival* (1987), *India: A Million Mutinies Now* (1990), *Beyond Belief* (1998) and *Half a Life* (2001).
Quotes
Showing 21-40 of 52
“Writers should provoke disagreement.”
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“If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don't express your disregard for the essence of the culture. It's a form of aggression.”
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“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 u...”
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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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“There are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to.”
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“My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh.”
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“I really wasn't equipped to be a writer when I left Oxford. But then I set out to learn. I've always had the highest regard for the craft. I've always felt it was work.”
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“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...”
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“It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separat...”
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“If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.”
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“I've been a free man.”
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“If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.”
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“I went to India and met some people who had been involved in this guerrilla business, middle-class people who were rather vain and foolish. There was no revolutionary grandeur to it. Nothing...”
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“I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.”
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“The longer I live the more convinced I become that one of the greatest honors we can confer on other people is to see them as they are, to recognize not only that they exist, but that they e...”
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“One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.”
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“To be a writer you have to be out in the world, you have to risk yourself in the world, you have to be immersed in the world, you have to go out looking for it. This becomes harder as you ge...”
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“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...”
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“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 s...”
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“I became very interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery.”
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