3 December 2020 V. S. Naipaul I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people’s lands.
3 December 2020 V. S. Naipaul One must always try to see the truth of a situation – it makes things universal.
3 December 2020 V. S. Naipaul 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.’
3 December 2020 V. S. Naipaul Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.
3 December 2020 V. S. Naipaul 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.
3 December 2020 V. S. Naipaul I went to India and met some people who had been involved in this guerrilla business, middle-class people who were rather vain and foolish. There was no revolutionary grandeur to it. Nothing.
3 December 2020 V. S. Naipaul 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.
3 December 2020 V. S. Naipaul The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 V. S. Naipaul Home is, I suppose just a child’s idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.
