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" If a man begins writing at thirty, by the time he is fifty or sixty, the bulk of his work has been done. By the time he is eighty, he's got nothing more, you know? "

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" 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. "

V. S. Naipaul

View

History

Group

" I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years. "

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

" 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. "

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

" Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand. "

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

" The world is always in movement. "

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

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

V. S. Naipaul

You

Intellectual

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

" You need someone to see what you've done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what's gone into it. "

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

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

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

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

" The writer is all alone. "

V. S. Naipaul

Alone

Writer

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

" 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. "

" 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.' "

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

" 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. "

" The longer I live the more convinced I become that one of the greatest honors we can confer on other people is to see them as they are, to recognize not only that they exist, but that they exist in specific ways and have specific realities. "

V. S. Naipaul

See

Live

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" In England I am not English, in India I am not Indian. I am chained to the 1,000 square miles that is Trinidad; but I will evade that fate yet. "

" I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness. "

" I have a very small public. "

" I've never abandoned the novel. "