V. S. Naipaul

“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?”

“I'm very content.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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?”

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

“I've never abandoned the novel.”

“It is important not to trust people too much.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”