V. S. Naipaul
What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.Collection: Attitude
I went to India and met some people who had been involved in this guerrilla business, middle-class people who were rather vain and foolish. There was no revolutionary grandeur to it. Nothing.Collection: Business
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.Collection: Experience
The world is always in movement.Collection: Nature
Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.Collection: Home
Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.Collection: Society
If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.Collection: Alone
Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.Collection: History
To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter.'Collection: History
I've been a free man.
I became very interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery.
It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut.
That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which is never an easy thing to do.
Writers should provoke disagreement.
I read many things. I read to fill in my knowledge of the world.
Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand.
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.
What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material. And the fictional form was going to force you to do things with the material, to dramatize it in a certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to explore the world, the other world, the world that one didn't know fully.
You need someone to see what you've done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what's gone into it.
The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
My life is short. I can't listen to banality.
At school I had only admirers; I had no friends.
One isn't born one's self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people's ideas - and you have to work through it all.
The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.
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.
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.
But everything of value about me is in my books.
I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
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.
The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.
I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.
An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.
It's very attractive to people to be a victim. Instead of having to think out the whole situation, about history and your group and what you are doing... if you begin from the point of view of being a victim, you've got it half-made. I mean intellectually.
Africa has no future.
I came to London. It had become the center of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost.
I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true.
Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will - with luck - come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise.
All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.
I will say I am the sum of my books.
Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.
The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.
We made no inquiries about India or about the families people had left behind. When our ways of thinking had changed, and we wished to know, it was too late. I know nothing of the people on my father's side; I know only that some of them came from Nepal.
As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.
One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh.
The longer I live the more convinced I become that one of the greatest honors we can confer on other people is to see them as they are, to recognize not only that they exist, but that they exist in specific ways and have specific realities.
If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
Nothing was made in Trinidad.