If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.
The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves.
An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
It’s very attractive to people to be a victim. Instead of having to think out the whole situation, about history and your group and what you are doing… if you begin from the point of view of being a victim, you’ve got it half-made. I mean intellectually.
We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.
And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of victory fills a moment and then is over
(From AZ Quotes. Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, TC, is a Nobel Prize-winning British writer who was born in Trinidad. Nobel Prize in Literature, Booker Prize, Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society)
RAJA ARASA RATNAM 