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" 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. "

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" I really wasn't equipped to be a writer when I left Oxford. But then I set out to learn. I've always had the highest regard for the craft. I've always felt it was work. "

V. S. Naipaul

Work

Learn

Craft

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" The writer is all alone. "

V. S. Naipaul

Alone

Writer

" If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris. "

V. S. Naipaul

You

Intellectual

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

" Nothing was made in Trinidad. "

V. S. Naipaul

Nothing

Made

" Whatever 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. "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" Writers should provoke disagreement. "

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

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

" I read many things. I read to fill in my knowledge of the world. "

" Writing has to support itself. "

" 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

" One must always try to see the truth of a situation - it makes things universal. "

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

" The world is always in movement. "

" I will say I am the sum of my books. "

V. S. Naipaul

Will

Books

" If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing. "

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

V. S. Naipaul

Books

About

" I've been a free man. "

" A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying. "

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

" I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea. "

" I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. "