V. S. Naipaul Quotes
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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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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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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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The writer is all alone.
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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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Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
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I read many things. I read to fill in my knowledge of the world.
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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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If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.
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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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I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world.
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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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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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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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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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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've never abandoned the novel.
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Nothing was made in Trinidad.
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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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I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.
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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.