V. S. Naipaul Quotes
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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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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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The writer is all alone.
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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
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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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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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What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.
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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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Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
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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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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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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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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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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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The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.
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Nothing was made in Trinidad.
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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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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.