Writing isn't a young man's game. It's for the mature, the suffering, the wounded – for people who need elucidation.

For many years I have sent myself to sleep with the idea of death – which is an aspect of this feeling that life is an illusion. Very violent pictures of death, I must say. I used to think of my head being cut off, with two strokes of an axe, rather than one … Nowadays I sleep with the idea of a bullet being put in the back of my head … it comforts me.

A lot of my work until, I would say, my second Indian book, was really snatched out of panic by a man who was really doubting his ability to go on. It's very hard to make novels out of experience so fractured and muddled. Novels, a body of work, come best out of whole and single societies.

I've stretched myself. Right from the start I've gone on doing difficult things, not out of poverty but out of experience. And because I've taken it to the limit of my talent, I've come to know myself. It has completely taken me over. I am nothing but my vocation really.

You know, I feel I'm a bad advertisement for my work. That is one reason why I'm slightly ashamed of meeting people who've read it. I feel I might let the work down.

… I began [writing] at a time when the world was beginning to change. Empires were withdrawing, and I had a kind of childish faith that there was going to be a reorganisation of the world. That it was going to be all right. The discovery is that it isn't going to be alright.

V.S. Naipaul, from various interviews.