V. S. Naipaul

“I had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment.”

“Nothing was made in Trinidad.”

“I've been a free man.”

“Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.”

“A cat only has itself.”

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

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

“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.'”

“But everything of value about me is in my books.”

“How can you be an atheist and have an ideology to go with it? To be an atheist is to be free of some areas of belief. I don't see how that can become an ideology.”

“The world is always in movement.”

“The writer is all alone.”

“One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Africa is not a fun place, you know. A fun place is somewhere that lifts the spirits, that cossets the senses. I don't think that can be said of the Africa I traveled in.”

“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.”