Quotes from V. S. Naipaul

Africa has no future.

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

I've never abandoned the novel.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

In England people are very proud of being very stupid.

It is important not to trust people too much.

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.

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

Africa has no future.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

The writer is all alone.