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I Wish My Prose To Be Transparenti Don't Want The Reader To Stumble Over Me; I Want Him To Look Through What I'm Saying To What I'm Describing. I Don't Want Him Ever To Say, Oh, Goodness, How Nicely Written This Is. That Would Be A Failure.

-V. S. Naipaul

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I Wish My Prose

V. S. Naipaul

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I Wish My Prose To Be Transparenti Don't Want The Reader To Stumble Over Me; I Want Him To Look Through What I'm Saying To What I'm Describing. I Don't Want Him Ever To Say, Oh, Goodness, How Nicely Written This Is. That Would Be A Failure.

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Whenever I Have Had To Write Fiction, I've Always Had To Invent A Character Who Roughly Has My Background.

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Making A Book Is Such A Big Enterprise.

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.

Writers Should Provoke Disagreement.

I Know My Father And My Mother, But Beyond That I Cannot Go. My Ancestry Is Blurred.

His Ignorance Seemed To Widen With Everything He Read.

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Some Writers Can Only Deal With Childhood Experience, Because It's Complete. For Another Kind Of Writer, Life Goes On, And He's Able To Keep Processing That As Well.

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I've Never Abandoned The Novel.

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In England I Am Not English, In India I Am Not Indian. I Am Chained To The 1,000 Square Miles That Is Trinidad; But I Will Evade That Fate Yet.

If Writers Just Sit And Talk About Oppression, They Are Not Going To Do Much Writing.

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To Read A Newspaper For The First Time Is Like Coming Into A Film That Has Been On For An Hour. Newspapers Are Like Serials. To Understand Them You Have To Take Knowledge To Them; The Knowledge That Serves Best Is The Knowledge Provided By The Newspaper Itself.

The Past Has To Be Seen To Be Dead; Or The Past Will Kill.

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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.

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I've Been A Free Man.

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Judgment Is Contained In The Act Of Trying To Understand.

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I Am The Kind Of Writer That People Think Other People Are Reading.

You Need Someone To See What You've Done, To Read It And To Understand It And To Appreciate What's Gone Into It.

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I Read A Piece Of Writing And Within A Paragraph Or Two I Know Whether It Is By A Woman Or Not.

I Will Say I Am The Sum Of My Books.

Look, Boys, It Ever Strike You That The World Not Real At All? It Ever Strike You That We Have The Only Mind In The World And You Just Thinking Up Everything Else? Like Me Here, Having The Only Mind In The World, And Thinking Up You People Here, Thinking Up The War And All The Houses And The Ships And Them In The Harbour. That Ever Cross Your Mind?

In A Way My Reputation Has Become That Of The Curmudgeon.

I Feel That At Any Stage Of My Literary Career It Could Have Been Said That The Last Book Contained All The Others.

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It Isn't That There's No Right And Wrong Here. There's No Right.

If A Writer Doesn't Generate Hostility, He Is Dead.

My Life Is Short. I Can't Listen To Banality.

When I Learnt To Write I Became My Own Master, I Became Very Strong, And That Strength Is With Me To This Very Day.

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We Cannot Understand All The Traits We Have Inherited. Sometimes We Can Be Strangers To Ourselves.

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What Was Past Was Past. I Suppose That Was The General Attitude.

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I'm Thought To Be A Tough Writer, But I'm Really A Softie.

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