V. S. Naipaul quotes:

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.

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.

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.

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 had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment.

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.'

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.

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.

In England people are very proud of being very stupid.

Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

It is important not to trust people too much.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

But everything of value about me is in my books.

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

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

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.

Life is a helluva thing. You can see trouble coming and you can't do a damn thing to prevent it coming. You just got to sit and watch and wait."

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

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

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.

The family feuds or the village feuds often had to do with an idea of honor. Perhaps it was a peasant idea; perhaps this idea of honor is especially important to a society without recourse to law or without confidence in law.

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

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.

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 came to London. It had become the center of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost.

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

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

Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.

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

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.

Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.

How could people like these, without words to put to their emotions and passions, manage? They could, at best, only suffer dumbly. Their pains and humiliations would work themselves out in their characters alone: like evil spirits possessing a body, so that the body itself might appear innocent of what it did.

I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs. You refer to yourself in order to understand other people. That's the novelist's gift, isn't it?

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

paradise seemed further away than India, but Hell had become a bit closer

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

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

Nothing was made in Trinidad.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

A businessman is someone who buys at ten and is happy to get out at twelve. The other kind of man buys at ten, sees it rise to eighteen and does nothing. He is waiting for it to rise to twenty. When it drops to two he waits for it to get back to ten.

A cat only has itself.

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

Africa has no future.

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

After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.

All cultures have been mingled forever.

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

And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of victory fills a moment and then is over

Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.

Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.

His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.

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

I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.

I have a very small public.

I often wonder what would have happened to me if I hadn't made that decision. I suppose I would have sunk. I suppose I would have found some kind of hole and tried to hide or pass. After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities. I would have hidden in my hole and been crippled by my sentimentality, doing what I was doing, and doing it well, but always looking for the wailing wall. And I would never have seen the world as the rich place that it is. You wouldn't have seen me here in Africa, doing what I do.

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

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.

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

I think when you see so many Hindu temples of the 10th century or earlier disfigured, defaced, you realise that something terrible happened. I feel the civilisation of that closed world was mortally wounded by those invasions the old world is destroyed. That has to be understood. Ancient Hindu India was destroyed.

I will say I am the sum of my books.

If it was Europe that gave us on the coast some idea of our history, it was Europe, I feel, that also introduced us to the lie.

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'm my own writer. My material means I'm entirely separate.

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

In our island myth this was the prescribed end of marriages like mine: the wife goes off with someone from the Cercle Sportif, outside whose gates at night the willingly betrayed husband waits in his motorcar. The circumstances were slightly.

In the beginning, before the arrival of the white men, I had considered myself neutral. I had wanted neither side to win, neither the army nor the rebels. As it turned out, both sides lost.

It has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. 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'.

It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling...

It isn't that there's no right and wrong here. There's no right.

I've been a free man.

I've never abandoned the novel.

Life doesn't have a neat beginning and a tidy end; life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should be all there.

Life is a helluva thing. You can see trouble coming and you can't do a damn thing to prevent it coming. You just got to sit and watch and wait.

Look, boys, it ever strike you that the world not real at all? It ever strike you that we have the only mind in the world and you just thinking up everything else? Like me here, having the only mind in the world, and thinking up you people here, thinking up the war and all the houses and the ships and them in the harbour. That ever cross your mind?

Making a book is such a big enterprise.

Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there.

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.

Out of its squalor and human decay, its eruptions of butchery, India produced so many people of grace and beauty, ruled by elaborate courtesy. Producing too much life, it denied the value of life; yet it permitted a unique human development to so many. Nowhere were people so heightened, rounded and individualistic; nowhere did they offer themselves so fully and with such assurance. To know Indians was to take a delight in people as people; every encounter was an adventure. I did not want India to sink [out of my memory]; the mere thought was painful.

People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.

Small things start us in new ways of thinking

Some lesser husbands built a latrine on the hillside.

The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves.

The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid people; and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and common.

The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.

The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.

The world is always in movement.

The writer is all alone.