God speaks...

And according to The New York Times, he draws out his syllables a lot. Rachel Donadio interviewed Sir Vidia:

'What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material,'' he said. ''And the fictional form was going to force you to do things with the material, to dramatize it in a certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to explore the world, the other world, the world that one didn't know fully.'' Naipaul's voice is rich and deep and mellowed by tobacco, and when he pronounced the word ''world,'' he savored it, drawing it out to almost three syllables. ''I thought if I didn't have this resource of nonfiction I would have dried up perhaps. I'd have come to the end of my material, and would have done what a writer like Graham Greene did. You know, he took the Graham Greene figure to the Congo, took him to Argentina, took him to Haiti, for no rhyme or reason.''
Naipaul has said he wrote the novel ''Half a Life'' (2001) only to fulfill a publisher's contract, and that ''Magic Seeds'' (2004) would be his last novel. (Over the years, he has often hinted at retirement, only to publish another book soon after.) Yet the fact that Naipaul has continued to write novels does not undercut his acute awareness of the form's limitations; indeed, it amplifies it. His is the lament of a writer who, through a life devoted to his craft, has discovered that the tools at his disposal are no longer adequate. ''If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account,'' Naipaul said. ''If you're a romantic writer, you write novels about men and women falling in love, etc., give a little narrative here and there. But again, it's of no account.''

Oh, so the novel's still dead, but we can expect a few more corpses from The Man.