V.S. Naipaul on the Arab Spring, Authors He Loathes, and the Books He will Never Write

Isaac Chotiner in The New Rebublic:

Isaac Chotiner: Are you working on anything at the moment?

V.S. Naipaul: I am far too old [laughs].

IC: So no more?

VSN: When you are eighty, you don’t have much more to say. Do you know any writers of eighty?

IC: I’m thinking. No.

VSN: Exactly. How can one? If a man begins writing at thirty, by the time he is fifty or sixty, the bulk of his work has been done. By the time he is eighty, he’s got nothing more, you know?

IC: You wrote a number of books after age sixty, though.

VSN: Yes, yes, I had to. There were things I had to say.

IC: Martin Amis said that, when he went back to read his early work, he found a certain energy in it that was absent in his later work, but he also said that, in terms of form, he thought his later work was stronger, at the sentence level.

VSN: Who said this?

More here.