The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
V.S. NAIPAULThe ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
V.S. NAIPAULLife is a helluva thing. You can see trouble coming and you can’t do a damn thing to prevent it coming. You just got to sit and watch and wait.
V.S. NAIPAULWriting has to support itself.
V.S. NAIPAULThe writer is all alone.
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. NAIPAULMen 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. NAIPAULIt’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.
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. NAIPAULMost people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.
V.S. NAIPAULI 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.
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. NAIPAULIn a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
V.S. NAIPAULTo 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. NAIPAULBut everything of value about me is in my books.
V.S. NAIPAULIgnorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
V.S. NAIPAULI’ve never abandoned the novel.
V.S. NAIPAUL