Top 100 V.S. Naipaul Quotes
#1. Everywhere else men are in movement, the world is in movement, and the past can only cause pain.
V.S. Naipaul
#2. And that luck was only fate's cheating, giving an illusion of power. But that illusion lingered, and I became restless. I decided to act, to challenge fate. (...) I gained courage; every afternoon I walked a little farther. And one day I got there.
V.S. Naipaul
#3. Anybody can be decisive during a panic; it takes a strong man to act during a boom.
V.S. Naipaul
#4. If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
V.S. Naipaul
#5. A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
V.S. Naipaul
#6. She had a great many opinions , but taken together they did not add up to a point of view .
V.S. Naipaul
#7. Me black and beautiful' was the first thing she taught me. Then she pointed to the policeman with the gun outside and taught me: 'He pig.
V.S. Naipaul
#8. You can't deny what you've learned; you can't deny your travels; you can't deny the nature of your life.
V.S. Naipaul
#9. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter.'
V.S. Naipaul
#10. The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.
V.S. Naipaul
#11. Ah, sahib. I know you just come to comfort a old man left to live by hisself. Soomintra say I too old-fashion. And Leela, she always by you. Why you don't sit down, sahib? It ain't dirty. Is just how it does look.'
Ganesh didn't sit down. 'Ramlogan, I come to buy over your taxis.
V.S. Naipaul
#12. I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie.
V.S. Naipaul
#13. Small things start us in new ways of thinking
V.S. Naipaul
#14. He spoke about Africa in an unusual way. He spoke of Africa as though Africa was a sick child and he was the parent.
V.S. Naipaul
#15. If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don't express your disregard for the essence of the culture. It's a form of aggression.
V.S. Naipaul
#16. I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.
V.S. Naipaul
#17. I find that the most difficult thing in prose narrative is linking one thing with the other. The link might just be a sentence, or even a word. It sums up what has gone before and prepares one for what is to come.
V.S. Naipaul
#19. Life doesn't have a neat beginning and a tidy end; life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should be all there.
V.S. Naipaul
#20. But the people I found, the people I was attracted to were not unlike myself. They were trying to find order in their world, looking for the centre..
V.S. Naipaul
#21. Like many isolated people, they were wrapped up in themselves and not too interested in the world outside.
V.S. Naipaul
#22. My life is short. I can't listen to banality.
V.S. Naipaul
#23. That life was full of rules. Too many rules; it was a prepacked kind of life.
V.S. Naipaul
#24. I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.
V.S. Naipaul
#25. One is made by all the things around one. There are many things that have made one. For a writer to go around looking for things that have made him is asking for trouble. It's like giving a character to yourself. Can't do it. Can't do it. These things are just there. Is that enough?
V.S. Naipaul
#26. There are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to.
V.S. Naipaul
#27. I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
V.S. Naipaul
#29. In England people are very proud of being very stupid.
V.S. Naipaul
#30. My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.
V.S. Naipaul
#31. ... and it was extraordinary to me that some of the newspapers could have found good words for the butchery on the coast. But people are like that bout places in which they aren't really interested and where thy don't have to live.
V.S. Naipaul
#32. The family feuds or the village feuds often had to do with an idea of honor. Perhaps it was a peasant idea; perhaps this idea of honor is especially important to a society without recourse to law or without confidence in law.
V.S. Naipaul
#33. And so my satisfactions had only been brothel satisfactions, which hadn't been satisfactions at all.
V.S. Naipaul
#34. To go back home was to play with impressions in this way, the way I played with the first pair of glasses I had, looking at a world now sharp and small and not quite real, now standard in size and real but blurred.
V.S. Naipaul
#35. But everything of value about me is in my books.
V.S. Naipaul
#36. A celestial camera recorded my every movement, impartially, without judgement or pity. I was marked; I was of interest; I would survive.
V.S. Naipaul
#37. I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands.
V.S. Naipaul
#38. I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world.
V.S. Naipaul
#39. It was a light which gave solidity to everything and drew colour out from the heart of objects.
V.S. Naipaul
#40. An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
V.S. Naipaul
#41. The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves.
V.S. Naipaul
#42. There are certain things that are too painful for people to even write about sometimes, and there are certain things that are too hard to read about again.
V.S. Naipaul
#43. I went to India and met some people who had been involved in this guerrilla business, middle-class people who were rather vain and foolish. There was no revolutionary grandeur to it. Nothing.
V.S. Naipaul
#44. I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.
V.S. Naipaul
#45. Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.
V.S. Naipaul
#46. I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
V.S. Naipaul
#47. In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
V.S. Naipaul
#50. Whatever they say about going back to the beginning, they'll be interested in the car.
V.S. Naipaul
#51. Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
V.S. Naipaul
#52. I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
V.S. Naipaul
#53. Around, beyond the trees, were the buildings. There you really did have an idea of the city as something made by man, and not as something that had just grown by itself and was simply there.
V.S. Naipaul
#54. Argentine political life is like the life of an ant community or an African forest tribe: full of events, full of crisis and deaths, but life is always cyclical, and the year ends as it begins.
V.S. Naipaul
#55. Life is a helluva thing. You can see trouble coming and you can't do a damn thing to prevent it coming. You just got to sit and watch and wait.
V.S. Naipaul
#56. All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.
V.S. Naipaul
#57. Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
V.S. Naipaul
#58. If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
V.S. Naipaul
#59. We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
V.S. Naipaul
#60. Without always knowing what we were doing we were constantly adjusting to the arbitrariness by which we were surrounded.
V.S. Naipaul
#61. To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn't know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.
V.S. Naipaul
#62. I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.
V.S. Naipaul
#63. Anand, look at the back of my hands. No hair. The sign of an advanced race, boy. And look at yours. No hair either. But you never know. With some of your mother's bad blood flowing in your veins you could wake up one morning and find yourself hairy like a monkey
V.S. Naipaul
#65. Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will - with luck - come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise.
V.S. Naipaul
#66. Government that breaks its own laws can also easily break you.
V.S. Naipaul
#67. I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
V.S. Naipaul
#68. The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.
V.S. Naipaul
#69. I read many things. I read to fill in my knowledge of the world.
V.S. Naipaul
#70. For the first time in his life he began to experience a kind of true pride. He felt himself, so to speak, taking up space when he walked in the streets; and he wondered whether this was how other people felt all the time, without effort, all the secure people he met in London and Africa.
V.S. Naipaul
#71. Out of every kind of nervousness I didn't move.
V.S. Naipaul
#73. That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which is never an easy thing to do.
V.S. Naipaul
#74. If it was Europe that gave us on the coast some idea of our history, it was Europe, I feel, that also introduced us to the lie.
V.S. Naipaul
#75. If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.
V.S. Naipaul
#76. I became very interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery.
V.S. Naipaul
#77. One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
V.S. Naipaul
#78. The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.
V.S. Naipaul
#79. 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?
V.S. Naipaul
#80. The longer I live the more convinced I become that one of the greatest honors we can confer on other people is to see them as they are, to recognize not only that they exist, but that they exist in specific ways and have specific realities.
V.S. Naipaul
#81. Attributed the decay of Hindu society in Trinidad to the rise of the timorous, weak, non-beating class of husband.
V.S. Naipaul
#82. The President's white men, the promise of order and continuity; and it was oddly comforting, like the sound of rain in the night.
V.S. Naipaul
#83. I wish my prose to be transparent-I don't want the reader to stumble over me; I want him to look through what I'm saying to what I'm describing. I don't want him ever to say, Oh, goodness, how nicely written this is. That would be a failure.
V.S. Naipaul
#84. Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.
V.S. Naipaul
#85. In our island myth this was the prescribed end of marriages like mine: the wife goes off with someone from the Cercle Sportif, outside whose gates at night the willingly betrayed husband waits in his motorcar. The circumstances were slightly.
V.S. Naipaul
#86. It was in that garage that Alec worked, no longer wearing red bodices or peeing blue, but doing mysterious greasy things.
V.S. Naipaul
#87. Doing many more things until it seemed that ritual had replaced grief.
V.S. Naipaul
#88. We have nothing. We solace ourselves with the great men of our tribe, the Gandhi and the Nehru, and we castrate ourselves. 'Here, take my manhood and invest it for me. Take my manhood and be a greater man yourself, for my sake!
V.S. Naipaul
#90. I felt his pain as an extra pressure on myself. I mentally added his pain to mine, made it part of my own.
V.S. Naipaul
#91. It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut.
V.S. Naipaul
#92. I came to London. It had become the center of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost.
V.S. Naipaul
#93. They say that men should look at the mother of the girl they intend to marry," Yvette said. "Girls who did what I did should consider the wife a man has discarded or worn out, and know thye are not going to do much better.
V.S. Naipaul
#94. We had become what the world outside had made us; we had to live in the world as it existed.
V.S. Naipaul
#95. I had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment.
V.S. Naipaul
#96. That was the best time. The last day, the day of leaving. It was a good journey. It became different at the other end.
V.S. Naipaul
#97. The first 50 years of the cinema were absolutely great years. Original minds were at work establishing the ways to tell a story. And what is happening now is a copying, a pastiche-ing of what was done by great men.
V.S. Naipaul
#98. Certain emotions bridge the years and link unlikely places.
V.S. Naipaul
#99. Neither my father nor grandfather could put dates to their stories. Not because they had forgotten or were confused; the past was simply the past.
V.S. Naipaul
#100. But this is madness. I am going in the wrong direction. There can't be a new life at the end of this.
V.S. Naipaul
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