V. S. Naipaul

"The writer is all alone."

"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."

"What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude."

"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."

"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."

"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."