Quotes from V. S. Naipaul

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Writers should provoke disagreement.

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.

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

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

I've been a free man.

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

The writer is all alone.