V. S. Naipaul Quotes
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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.
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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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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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A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
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In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
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The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.
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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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I have a very small public.
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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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I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie.
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Writers should provoke disagreement.
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The world is always in movement.
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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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A cat only has itself.
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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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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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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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I will say I am the sum of my books.
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I read many things. I read to fill in my knowledge of the world.
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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?
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If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
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At school I had only admirers; I had no friends.
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If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.