V. S. Naipaul Quotes
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The time before Islam is a time of blackness: that is part of Muslim theology. History has to serve theology.'
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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.
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A writer is in the end not his books, but his myth. And that myth is in the keeping of others.
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An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
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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.
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I have a very small public.
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The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.
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In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
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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.
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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.
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The world is always in movement.
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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.
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A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
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At school I had only admirers; I had no friends.
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When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.
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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.
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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.
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A cat only has itself.
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If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
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I will say I am the sum of my books.
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I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie.
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If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
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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.