James Meek interview

“There are no rules in writing. I recently read A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul. He wrote that in his 20s. I think the truth is that there are some people who just live, they don’t get a job necessarily, but they have a particular ability to hear and to see and to feel and to use all their senses and to remember.... And then the final quality, which is to take the words and make them stick to everything they have experienced and even if they’ve been seeming to sit in one place and know nobody other than their family and their friends in their own little locale, they can write something stupendous. Having said that, we can’t all be Naipaul. Some people need more time, more life, more collisions with strangeness.”