V. S. Naipaul

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.

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

Writers should provoke disagreement.

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

The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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

Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.

How could people like these, without words to put to their emotions and passions, manage? They could, at best, only suffer dumbly. Their pains and humiliations would work themselves out in their characters alone: like evil spirits possessing a body, so that the body itself might appear innocent of what it did.

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.

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

Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.

Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.