One must always try to see the truth of a situation – it makes things universal.
V.S. NAIPAULOne must always try to see the truth of a situation – it makes things universal.
V.S. NAIPAULMy life is short. I can’t listen to banality.
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. NAIPAULSome 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.
V.S. NAIPAULIt is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That’s where the mischief starts. That’s where everything starts unravelling.
V.S. NAIPAULI feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.
V.S. NAIPAULI could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.
V.S. NAIPAULIt isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.
V.S. NAIPAULHome is, I suppose just a child’s idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.
V.S. NAIPAULJudgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
V.S. NAIPAULThe 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.
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. NAIPAULHis ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.
V.S. NAIPAULWriting has to support itself.
V.S. NAIPAULWhen I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.
V.S. NAIPAULI am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
V.S. NAIPAUL