The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
V. S. Naipaul
The world is always in movement.
Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.
An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.
Making a book is such a big enterprise.
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.'
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.
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.
In England people are very proud of being very stupid.
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.
I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.
I've been a free man.
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.
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.
What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.
I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.
If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.
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.
When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.
At school I had only admirers; I had no friends.
One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
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.
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.
If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.
My life is short. I can't listen to banality.
I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
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.
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.
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.
Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.
I read many things. I read to fill in my knowledge of the world.
I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.
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.
Writers should provoke disagreement.
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.
The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.
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.
But everything of value about me is in my books.
The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie.
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?
Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand.
I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
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.
You need someone to see what you've done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what's gone into it.
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 had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment.
