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" 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. "

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" That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which is never an easy thing to do. "

V. S. Naipaul

I Am

Judging

Look

" 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. "

" I had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment. "

" I've been a free man. "

" I came to London. It had become the center of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost. "

" The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it. "

" 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. "

" In England people are very proud of being very stupid. "

" Africa has no future. "

" Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others. "

" If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don't express your disregard for the essence of the culture. It's a form of aggression. "

" I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie. "

" But everything of value about me is in my books. "

V. S. Naipaul

Books

About

" Making a book is such a big enterprise. "

" The world is always in movement. "

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

" If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms, break the forms. "

" The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing. "

" An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally. "

" 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. "

" One isn't born one's self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people's ideas - and you have to work through it all. "

" I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands. "

" One is made by all the things around one. There are many things that have made one. For a writer to go around looking for things that have made him is asking for trouble. It's like giving a character to yourself. Can't do it. Can't do it. These things are just there. Is that enough? "

V. S. Naipaul

Yourself

Giving

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

" 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. "

" This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true. "

" The writer is all alone. "

V. S. Naipaul

Alone

Writer

" I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred. "

" It is important not to trust people too much. "

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