S. Naipaul
S. Naipaul
two interesting people
Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
father becoming stories
All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.
ignorance
His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.
all-alone
The writer is all alone.
cities estates aspect
The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
names two talking
There are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to.
thinking quality wonderful
I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.
men years great-year
The first 50 years of the cinema were absolutely great years. Original minds were at work establishing the ways to tell a story. And what is happening now is a copying, a pastiche-ing of what was done by great men.
childhood goes-on able
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.
heart cutting years
It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut.
cat
A cat only has itself.
people feels
I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
book past long
To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn't know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.
writing judging looks
That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which is never an easy thing to do.