V. S. Naipaul

The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.

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.

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.

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.

But everything of value about me is in my books.

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.

I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand.

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.

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.

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.

To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter.'

Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

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.

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.

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

My life is short. I can't listen to banality.

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.

Writers should provoke disagreement.

If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.

Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.

It's very attractive to people to be a victim. Instead of having to think out the whole situation, about history and your group and what you are doing... if you begin from the point of view of being a victim, you've got it half-made. I mean intellectually.

I really wasn't equipped to be a writer when I left Oxford. But then I set out to learn. I've always had the highest regard for the craft. I've always felt it was work.

Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.

I've never abandoned the novel.

If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.

Nothing was made in Trinidad.

An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.

In England I am not English, in India I am not Indian. I am chained to the 1,000 square miles that is Trinidad; but I will evade that fate yet.

If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.

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.

I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.

Africa has no future.

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.

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.

The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.

Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.

The world is always in movement.

What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.