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" 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

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" The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate. "

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

" I'm very content. "

V. S. Naipaul

Content

Very

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

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

" We made no inquiries about India or about the families people had left behind. When our ways of thinking had changed, and we wished to know, it was too late. I know nothing of the people on my father's side; I know only that some of them came from Nepal. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness. "

" I became very interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

V. S. Naipaul

You

Intellectual

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

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

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

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

" My life is short. I can't listen to banality. "

" To be a writer you have to be out in the world, you have to risk yourself in the world, you have to be immersed in the world, you have to go out looking for it. This becomes harder as you get older because there's less energy, the days are shorter for older people and it's not so easy to go out and immerse oneself in the world outside. "

" 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

" The writer is all alone. "

V. S. Naipaul

Alone

Writer

" 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. "

" I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world. "

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

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

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