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.
From V. S. Naipaul
I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
But everything of value about me is in my books.
One isn't born one's self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people's ideas - and you have to work through it all.
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.
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.
In Trinidad, where as new arrivals we were a disadvantaged community, that excluding idea was a kind of protection; it enabled us - for the time being, and only for the time being - to live in our own way and according to our own rules, to live in our own fading India.
I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.
If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
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.'
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