V. S. Naipaul

Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand.

If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.

Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.

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.

I really wasn't equipped to be a writer when I left Oxford. But then I set out to learn. I've always had the highest regard for the craft. I've always felt it was work.

I had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment.