The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

I’m my own writer. My material means I’m entirely separate.

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

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.

V.S. Naipaul

To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn’t know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.

V.S. Naipaul

Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.

V.S. Naipaul

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

V.S. Naipaul

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.

V.S. Naipaul

I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.

V.S. Naipaul

The writer is all alone.

V.S. Naipaul

I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people’s lands.

V.S. Naipaul

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.

V.S. Naipaul

Writers should provoke disagreement.

V.S. Naipaul

Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there.

V.S. Naipaul