V. S. Naipaul Quotes
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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.
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What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I read many things. I read to fill in my knowledge of the world.
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If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.
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You need someone to see what you've done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what's gone into it.
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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.
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Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.
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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.
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Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.
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I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world.
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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.
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Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
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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.
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The writer is all alone.
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Nothing was made in Trinidad.
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I've never abandoned the novel.
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My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.