Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.
— V. S. Naipaul
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've never abandoned the novel.
An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
My life is short. I can't listen to banality.
I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.
The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
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.
What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.
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.
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.
But everything of value about me is in my books.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
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.
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.
Africa has no future.
One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
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 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.
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.
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.
The world is always in movement.
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.
Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.
Nothing was made in Trinidad.
If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
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.
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.
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 will say I am the sum of my books.
The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.
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.
I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
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.
