V. S. Naipaul

Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.

All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.

A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.

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.

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.

If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.

You need someone to see what you've done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what's gone into it.

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.

There are certain things that are too painful for people to even write about sometimes, and there are certain things that are too hard to read about again.

One must always try to see the truth of a situation - it makes things universal.

I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world.

Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.

My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.

I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.

Making a book is such a big enterprise.

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.

I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands.

I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.

It is important not to trust people too much.

In England people are very proud of being very stupid.

I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.

To be a writer you have to be out in the world, you have to risk yourself in the world, you have to be immersed in the world, you have to go out looking for it. This becomes harder as you get older because there's less energy, the days are shorter for older people and it's not so easy to go out and immerse oneself in the world outside.

The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.

A cat only has itself.

I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.

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.

At school I had only admirers; I had no friends.

If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms, break the forms.

One is made by all the things around one. There are many things that have made one. For a writer to go around looking for things that have made him is asking for trouble. It's like giving a character to yourself. Can't do it. Can't do it. These things are just there. Is that enough?

I read many things. I read to fill in my knowledge of the world.

How can you be an atheist and have an ideology to go with it? To be an atheist is to be free of some areas of belief. I don't see how that can become an ideology.

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?

The writer is all alone.

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.

Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.

I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people.

When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.

In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.

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.

Writing has to support itself.

I've been a free man.

I'm very content.

I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.

I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie.

Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it's complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he's able to keep processing that as well.

I have a very small public.

It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut.

I will say I am the sum of my books.

I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.

The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.