V. S. Naipaul

• "The writer is all alone.“
• "If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.“
• "What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.“
• "The 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.“
• "I went to India and met some people who had been involved in this guerrilla business, middle-class people who were rather vain and foolish. There was no revolutionary grandeur to it. Nothing.“
• "Some 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.“
• "Africa has no future.“
• "It'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.“
• "Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.“
• "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.'“
• "Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.“
• "I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands.“
• "Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.“
• "When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.“
• "It is important not to trust people too much.“
• "One must always try to see the truth of a situation - it makes things universal.“

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