Name the author who said, "My life is short. I can’t listen to banality."

In 2002 Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul (17 August 1932 – 11 August 2018). a Trinidadian-born British writer, was at a literary festival near New Delhi, India. The festival was held to honour him for his 2001 Nobel prize for literature.

At the event fellow writers Shashi Deshpande and Nayantara Sahgal (a niece of India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru) debated how gender oppression had affected their work. As they spoke about the harmful influence of English on Indian literature, Naipaul lost his temper: "Banality irritates me. My life is short. I can't listen to banality. This thing about colonialism, this thing about gender oppression, the very word oppression wearies me. If writers talk about oppression, they don't do much writing. Fifty years have gone by. What colonialism are you talking about?"

Amid uproar the writer and film-maker Ruchir Joshi shouted, "You're being obnoxious!" The situation was pacified by the poet and novelist Vikram Seth, who allowed Deshpande to reply to his tirade. "What does not affect anybody would be banal to them," she said. "When I was listening to this talk about the anguish of the exile, I was really cool about it," she added in a pointed reference to Naipaul's comfortable life in England.