V.S. Naipaul on BBC TV, 1994
“I’ve always been a writer. I’ve thought about it every day. There’s not been a day or part of a day when I’ve not thought about it . . . It has enabled me to be a free man . . . I’ve not written anything that I didn’t want to write.”
— V.S. Naipaul, interviewed by Jeremy Isaacs for the BBC TV programme Face to Face in May 1994. The BBC has just added a series of forty radio and TV interviews with “British” writers to their online archive, at a special page called “In Their Own Words”. The earliest, from 1937, is with Virginia Woolf; the most recent, from last year, with A.S. Byatt. The only other semi-Caribbean writer in the lot is Zadie Smith.
(By coincidence, it’s Naipaul’s birthday tomorrow.)
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No doubt he really wanted to write all that copy he churned out for the Cement & Concrete Association.
“I’ve not been humiliated by employment, in my own eyes.” Most writers eventually engage in at least some light rescripting of their personal narratives. To emphasise the essential truths, of course.