"Let us add one more complication success brings: the illusion of predestination. In this regard I cannot help recalling a long conversation with V. S. Naipaul in which he insisted that he could not have failed as an author, and that recognition, even immediate recognition, of his genius was inevitable, simply because he was so good. I could not persuade him to accept that he only believed this because he had in fact been successful and that it must have been possible, given the worldâs perversity, for recognition to have eluded him. The conviction of predestination came after the event."
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Nobel laureates in LiteratureTravel writersEssayistsAcademics from the United KingdomNovelists from the United Kingdom
Original Language: English
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Tim Parks, in "Stifled by Success", The New York Review of Books (12 March 2015)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/V._S._Naipaul
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V. S. Naipaul
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul (17 August 1932 - 11 August 2018) was a British writer of Indo-Nepalese descent born and raised in Trinidad. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001.
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