V. S. Naipaul
I've never abandoned the novel.
I had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment.
I really wasn't equipped to be a writer when I left Oxford. But then I set out to learn. I've always had the highest regard for the craft. I've always felt it was work.
I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
To be a writer you have to be out in the world, you have to risk yourself in the world, you have to be immersed in the world, you have to go out looking for it. This becomes harder as you get older because there's less energy, the days are shorter for older people and it's not so easy to go out and immerse oneself in the world outside.
I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
In England people are very proud of being very stupid.
It is important not to trust people too much.
I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands.
Making a book is such a big enterprise.
I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.
Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.
I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world.
One must always try to see the truth of a situation - it makes things universal.
There are certain things that are too painful for people to even write about sometimes, and there are certain things that are too hard to read about again.
The first 50 years of the cinema were absolutely great years. Original minds were at work establishing the ways to tell a story. And what is happening now is a copying, a pastiche-ing of what was done by great men.
If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don't express your disregard for the essence of the culture. It's a form of aggression.
A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.
My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.
I have a very small public.
I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie.
I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.
I'm very content.
Writing has to support itself.
Africa is not a fun place, you know. A fun place is somewhere that lifts the spirits, that cossets the senses. I don't think that can be said of the Africa I traveled in.
In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.
A cat only has itself.
Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
There are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to.
The writer is all alone.
If a man begins writing at thirty, by the time he is fifty or sixty, the bulk of his work has been done. By the time he is eighty, he's got nothing more, you know?
How can you be an atheist and have an ideology to go with it? To be an atheist is to be free of some areas of belief. I don't see how that can become an ideology.
One is made by all the things around one. There are many things that have made one. For a writer to go around looking for things that have made him is asking for trouble. It's like giving a character to yourself. Can't do it. Can't do it. These things are just there. Is that enough?
If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms, break the forms.
I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
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.Collection: Self
The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.Collection: Lying
Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.Collection: People
After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.Collection: Ideas
It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling.Collection: Views
The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.Collection: Past
Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.Collection: Two
The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid people; and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and common.Collection: Running
His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.Collection: Ignorance