V. S. Naipaul

When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.

It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling.

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.

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

His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.

I think when you see so many Hindu temples of the 10th century or earlier disfigured, defaced, you realise that something terrible happened. I feel the civilisation of that closed world was mortally wounded by those invasions the old world is destroyed. That has to be understood. Ancient Hindu India was destroyed.

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

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

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

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

The world is always in movement.

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.

It has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. 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'.

Look, boys, it ever strike you that the world not real at all? It ever strike you that we have the only mind in the world and you just thinking up everything else? Like me here, having the only mind in the world, and thinking up you people here, thinking up the war and all the houses and the ships and them in the harbour. That ever cross your mind?

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

Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it's complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he's able to keep processing that as well.

But everything of value about me is in my books.

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

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.

Small things start us in new ways of thinking

We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.