“A writer is in the end not his books, but his myth. And that myth is in the keeping of others.”

— V.S. Naipaul

"Steinbeck in Monterey" (1970), in Daily Telegraph Magazine (3 April 1970), later published in The Overcrowded Barracoon, and other articles (1972)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Oct. 1, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "A writer is in the end not his books, but his myth. And that myth is in the keeping of others." by V.S. Naipaul?

V.S. Naipaul 34

Trinidadian-British writer of Indo-Nepalese ancestry 1932–2018

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French photographer

Source: Henri Cartier-Bresson: Interviews and Conversations, 1951-1998, Conversation. Interview with Byron Dobell (1957), p. 32

“We need myths that will identify the individual not with his local group but with the planet.”

Joseph Campbell The Power of Myth

Source: The Power of Myth

“Myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.”

Jorge Luis Borges Dreamtigers

"Parable of Cervantes and Don Quixote" (January 1955)
Tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998)
Dreamtigers (1960)
Variant: In the beginning of literature there is myth, as there is also in the end of it.

“The task of revolutionary leaders is to pose as problems not only this myth, but all the other myths used by the oppressor elites to oppress.”

Paulo Freire (1921–1997) educator and philosopher

Pedagogia do oprimido (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) (1968, English trans. 1970)

“Dream is personalized myth, myth is depersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic”

Joseph Campbell book The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Source: The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), Chapter 1
Context: Dream is personalized myth, myth is depersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamics of the psyche. But in the dream the forms are quirked by the peculiar troubles of the dreamer, whereas in myth the problem and solutions shown are directly valid for all mankind.

“When I used [in his speech] the word silent myths it was for a personal reason. I mean that the relations of pictorial art to the formation of myths has to be silent, consequently not illustrative. In this part of Jutland where the life of the myth has grown strongest and is kept deepest for millenniums, here where I come from and where I have known the richness of the narrative imagination of the people, here I wanted to place a monument to the anonymous strength of the word, not to a single myth, nor to a single cycle of myths, because the myths of the Edda, of the heroic poetry, yes perhaps particularly the myths of the Kalevala, have inspired me like the myth which is to be created today in the people who are glad to tell, racy and fertile.”

Asger Jorn (1914–1973) Danish artist

Quote from Jorn's speech at the library of Silkeborg, September l0th 1953 (translated from an unpublished Danish manuscript by Guy Atkins) ; as quoted on the website of the Jorn Museum Articles by Jorn http://www.museumjorn.dk/en/article_presentation.asp?AjrDcmntId=255
1949 - 1958, Various sources