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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

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" My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world. "

" 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. "

" The world is always in movement. "

" 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. "

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" 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. "

" Great writing can be done in biography, history, art. "

" I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the 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. "

" I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are 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. "

" Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand. "

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" Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society. "

" All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right. "

" I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading. "

" 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. "

" Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives. "

" Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my 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

" A cat only has 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" At school I had only admirers; I had no friends. "

" If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead. "

V. S. Naipaul

Writer

Hostility

" 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. "

" In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon. "

" Making a book is such a big enterprise. "