V. S. Naipaul Quotes

I always say, and I truly believe this, that my work is three steps ahead of me. I have an idea for something and I tend to feel like it's leading me and I'll follow the process through, and it's not until after I've seen it that I truly understand why I'm doing this.

I don't start a piece knowing exactly what effect it's going to have. There is a seed of an idea that I could never articulate, right at the beginning of the piece, literally like one cell.

I don't know what the secret is when I am writing it - it really is a surprise to me.

Sometimes when I write songs, I don't know what they're about, and it just suddenly comes to me.

The other thing in composition is opening up the unconscious.

I said, other people can write songs, let's see if I can. So the first 400 or 500 wound up on the floor somewhere. Then I wrote one called Melissa.

Writing is an incessant process of discovery.

I write based on powerful inner impulses, and those seem to shift over time.

You don't make a movie, the movie makes you.

I don't outline; I listen to a kind of whisper inside the material.

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 some years.

I don't believe that a writer does something wonderful spontaneously. I believe it's the result of years of living, of study, reading, his very personality and temperament. At one particular moment, all these come together and the artist 'expresses' himself.

Every now and then, I feel terribly uncomfortable with what I'm working on, and then I think maybe I am an artist. I'm not very articulate about it, but I do know that you have to follow your gut.

A collection is not just one basic idea. It comes from something that is in the air, something you suddenly like and put down on paper and then work out.

What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it's going to end up.

I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs. They all find their place in the world, but they all start off in the same place. I'm always painting and drawing as well, and it's an ongoing creative assignment.

My works really begin in a very simple way. Sometimes it's an image, and sometimes it's words I might write, like a fragment of a poem.

Imagination has rules, but we can only guess what they are.

My writing is inspired by just about everything, yet I am unaware of so much of the process.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that writing is mysterious; you don't ever truly know where it is coming from, so don't edit yourself line by line. Don't get in your own way. Whatever is truly there at the core, that is your voice.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

You have to - you have to allow something to tell you what it wants to be.

There is something in our minds like sunshine and the weather, which is not under our control. When I write, the best things come to me from I know not where.

To know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing... When I find myself facing a blank page, that’s always going through my head. What I capture in spite of myself interests me more than my own ideas.

Sometimes you do know where the ideas are coming from and sometimes you don't. You might get a song coming through that you just don't know about.