I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
— V. S. Naipaul
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?
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?
Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
I've been a free man.
I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.
I have a very small public.
A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
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.
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.
Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.
Making a book is such a big enterprise.
Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.
In England people are very proud of being very stupid.
The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
Writers should provoke disagreement.
At school I had only admirers; I had no friends.
I read many things. I read to fill in my knowledge of the world.
The writer is all alone.
A cat only has itself.
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'm very content.
I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie.
My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.
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.
You need someone to see what you've done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what's gone into it.
One must always try to see the truth of a situation - it makes things universal.
Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
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 profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.
If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms, break the forms.
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.
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.
When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.
Writing has to support itself.
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.
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.
All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.
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.
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.
I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world.
I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.
I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands.
It is important not to trust people too much.
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.
Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand.
