How does a writer pass from the fantasy to the ambition to the act of writing? In this essay of literary autobiography, V.S. Naipaul sifts through memories of his childhood in Trinidad, his university days in England and his responses to his family's native India, seeking the experiences of life and literature that shaped his imagination and reflecting on the very different possibilities that he found in the novel and the travel book for capturing the truth of his subjects. 'As a child trying to read, I had felt that two worlds separated me from the books that were offered to me at school and in the libraries - the childhood world if our remembered India, and the more colonial world of our city ... What I didn't know, even after I had written my early books of fiction ... was that those two spheres of darkness had become my subject. Fiction, working its mysteries, by indirections finding directions out, had led me to my subject. But it couldn't take me all the way.'