You need someone to see what you’ve done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what’s gone into it.
V.S. NAIPAULYou need someone to see what you’ve done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what’s gone into it.
V.S. NAIPAULI’ve never abandoned the novel.
V.S. NAIPAULI don’t feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
V.S. NAIPAULI have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
V.S. NAIPAULWriting has to support itself.
V.S. NAIPAULWriters should provoke disagreement.
V.S. NAIPAULWhatever 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. NAIPAULMany writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
V.S. NAIPAULI profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
V.S. NAIPAULAll cultures have been mingled forever.
V.S. NAIPAULOne must always try to see the truth of a situation – it makes things universal.
V.S. NAIPAULArgentine 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. NAIPAULIt has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. 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’.
V.S. NAIPAULAll 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. NAIPAULThe past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.
V.S. NAIPAULIf ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
V.S. NAIPAUL