{"id":6440,"date":"2022-08-25T10:27:59","date_gmt":"2022-08-25T09:27:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/?p=6440"},"modified":"2022-08-25T10:28:00","modified_gmt":"2022-08-25T09:28:00","slug":"quote-321-naipaul-on-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/2022\/08\/25\/quote-321-naipaul-on-writing\/","title":{"rendered":"Quote #321 Naipaul on writing"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p><em>I discovered that to be a writer was not (as I had imagined) a state &#8211; of competence, or achievement, or fame, or content &#8211; at which one arrived and where one stayed. There was a special anguish attached to the career: whatever the labor of any piece of writing, whatever its creative challenges and satisfactions, time had always taken me away from it. And, with time passing, I felt mocked by what I had already done; it seemed to belong to a time of vigor, now past for good.<\/em><\/p><cite>VS Naipaul, in The Enigma of Arrival (1987), p94<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I discovered that to be a writer was not (as I had imagined) a state &#8211; of competence, or achievement, or fame, or content &#8211; at which one arrived and where one stayed. There was a special anguish attached to the career: whatever the labor of any piece of writing, whatever its creative challenges and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-quotes"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5KQtW-1FS","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6440"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6440"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6440\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6441,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6440\/revisions\/6441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}