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" Africa is not a fun place, you know. A fun place is somewhere that lifts the spirits, that cossets the senses. I don't think that can be said of the Africa I traveled in. "
V. S. Naipaul
Know
You
Think
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" My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world. "
V. S. Naipaul
Grief
Writing
Dirty
" What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material. And the fictional form was going to force you to do things with the material, to dramatize it in a certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to explore the world, the other world, the world that one didn't know fully. "
V. S. Naipaul
Writing
World
Thought
" The world is always in movement. "
V. S. Naipaul
World
Movement
Always
" As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are. "
V. S. Naipaul
Children
Child
World
" My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh. "
V. S. Naipaul
Editor
She
Good
" There are certain things that are too painful for people to even write about sometimes, and there are certain things that are too hard to read about again. "
V. S. Naipaul
Write
Sometimes
People
" Great writing can be done in biography, history, art. "
V. S. Naipaul
Art
Done
Great
" I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time. "
V. S. Naipaul
Letting
You
Time
" In Trinidad, where as new arrivals we were a disadvantaged community, that excluding idea was a kind of protection; it enabled us - for the time being, and only for the time being - to live in our own way and according to our own rules, to live in our own fading India. "
V. S. Naipaul
Own
Live
Kind
" I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading. "
V. S. Naipaul
People
Writer
Reading
" The first 50 years of the cinema were absolutely great years. Original minds were at work establishing the ways to tell a story. And what is happening now is a copying, a pastiche-ing of what was done by great men. "
V. S. Naipaul
Men
Cinema
Done
" Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand. "
V. S. Naipaul
Kicked
Thing
Only
" Writing has to support itself. "
V. S. Naipaul
Itself
Support
Writing
" Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society. "
V. S. Naipaul
Society
Simple
Complex
" All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right. "
V. S. Naipaul
Father
Things
Right
" I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading. "
V. S. Naipaul
I Am
People
Kind
" Nothing was made in Trinidad. "
V. S. Naipaul
Nothing
Made
" Home 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. Naipaul
House
Place
Child
" Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives. "
V. S. Naipaul
Books
Tend
Many
" Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background. "
V. S. Naipaul
Write
Always
Background
" When 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. Naipaul
Strength
Day
Me
" A cat only has itself. "
V. S. Naipaul
Cat
Only
Itself
" There are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to. "
V. S. Naipaul
You
Talk
Name
" 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
Writing
Details
Life
" It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut. "
V. S. Naipaul
Paths
Good
Heart
" At school I had only admirers; I had no friends. "
V. S. Naipaul
Had
Friends
School
" If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead. "
V. S. Naipaul
Writer
Hostility
He
" How can you be an atheist and have an ideology to go with it? To be an atheist is to be free of some areas of belief. I don't see how that can become an ideology. "
V. S. Naipaul
See
Atheist
Become
" In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon. "
V. S. Naipaul
Become
Reputation
Way
" Making a book is such a big enterprise. "
V. S. Naipaul
Making
Enterprise
Big