S. Naipaul
S. Naipaul
ambition fame mysterious wish
It is mysterious that the ambition should have come first - the wish to be a writer, to have that distinction, that fame - and that this ambition should have come long before I could think of anything to write about.
books knew library realized remember taking
I knew he was a writer, we had all his books in the library, but it never really clicked. And I remember being in the library and taking out one of his books and then I realized -- he did this for a living.
england miles square
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.
people movement world
People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.
alone sit weave
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.
hard people
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.
converted destroy history stamp
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.'
school
At school I had only admirers; I had no friends.
break
If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms, break the forms.
becomes days harder immersed less looking older oneself people writer
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.
begins bulk man time work
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?
convinced honors longer people specific ways
The longer I live the more convinced I become that one of the greatest honors we can confer on other people is to see them as they are, to recognize not only that they exist, but that they exist in specific ways and have specific realities.
areas ideology
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.
certain chance explore felt fictional force form gave life nonfiction spend
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.