V S Naipaul Quotes

#1. Most of my favorite writers are over forty, and so I suppose I'll only name a few of the writers whose work I find myself constantly returning to: Edward P. Jones, Marilynne Robinson, Kazuo Ishiguro, V. S. Naipaul, Toni Morrison, and Philip Roth.

Dinaw Mengestu

#2. If Mr. [V.S.] Naipaul takes no pleasure in the happy delineation of the varieties of human nature, then he must be intolerably stupid.

Rosanne Cash

#3. 'Midnight's Children' falls under the genre of post-colonial writing, and there is a range of writers like V.S. Naipaul and Salman who popularised it. 'Midnight's Children' was incredibly important in this canon.

Satya Bhabha

#4. Everywhere else men are in movement, the world is in movement, and the past can only cause pain.

V.S. Naipaul

#5. 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.

V.S. Naipaul

#6. This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true.

V.S. Naipaul

#7. In what was happening now there was still that element of popular frenzy; but it was also clear that it was more organized, or that at least it had some deeper principle.

V.S. Naipaul

#8. I'm very content.

V.S. Naipaul

#9. 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

#10. You need someone to see what you've done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what's gone into it.

V.S. Naipaul

#11. Anybody can be decisive during a panic; it takes a strong man to act during a boom.

V.S. Naipaul

#12. We exchanged greetings, and in the African way we could make that take time.

V.S. Naipaul

#13. [In]the too solid three-dimensional city, I could never feel myself as anything but spectral, disintegrating, pointless, fluid.

V.S. Naipaul

#14. And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of victory fills a moment and then is over

V.S. Naipaul

#15. If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.

V.S. Naipaul

#16. We made no inquiries about India or about the families people had left behind. When our ways of thinking had changed, and we wished to know, it was too late. I know nothing of the people on my father's side; I know only that some of them came from Nepal.

V.S. Naipaul

#17. A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.

V.S. Naipaul

#18. She had a great many opinions , but taken together they did not add up to a point of view .

V.S. Naipaul

#19. A complying memory has obliterated many of them and edited my childhood down to a brief cinematic blur.

V.S. Naipaul

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. One isn't born one's self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people's ideas - and you have to work through it all.

V.S. Naipaul

#26. I have a very small public.

V.S. Naipaul

#27. I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie.

V.S. Naipaul

#28. Small things start us in new ways of thinking

V.S. Naipaul

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. In England I am not English, in India I am not Indian. I am chained to the 1,000 square miles that is Trinidad; but I will evade that fate yet.

V.S. Naipaul

#33. 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

#34. In Trinidad, where as new arrivals we were a disadvantaged community, that excluding idea was a kind of protection; it enabled us - for the time being, and only for the time being - to live in our own way and according to our own rules, to live in our own fading India.

V.S. Naipaul

#35. I will say I am the sum of my books.

V.S. Naipaul

#36. to be among the ruins was to have your time-sense unsettled.

V.S. Naipaul

#37. What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.

V.S. Naipaul

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. Like many isolated people, they were wrapped up in themselves and not too interested in the world outside.

V.S. Naipaul

#41. My life is short. I can't listen to banality.

V.S. Naipaul

#42. That life was full of rules. Too many rules; it was a prepacked kind of life.

V.S. Naipaul

#43. 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

#44. As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.

V.S. Naipaul

#45. If a writer knows everything that is going to happen, then his book is dead before he begins it.

V.S. Naipaul

#46. 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

#47. I liked to feel I had to do things perfectly; I felt I was earning my freedom. Though I was in hiding, and though I worked every day until midnight, I felt I was much more in charge of myself than I had ever been.

V.S. Naipaul

#48. 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

#49. I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.

V.S. Naipaul

#50. Making a book is such a big enterprise.

V.S. Naipaul

#51. In England people are very proud of being very stupid.

V.S. Naipaul

#52. One must always try to see the truth of a situation - it makes things universal.

V.S. Naipaul

#53. Non-fiction can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies.

V.S. Naipaul

#54. My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.

V.S. Naipaul

#55. How ridiculous were the attentions the weak paid one another in the shadow of the strong!

V.S. Naipaul

#56. ... 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

#57. 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

#58. And so my satisfactions had only been brothel satisfactions, which hadn't been satisfactions at all.

V.S. Naipaul

#59. 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

#60. But everything of value about me is in my books.

V.S. Naipaul

#61. I knew the door I wanted. I knocked.

V.S. Naipaul

#62. 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

#63. In the beginning, before the arrival of the white men, I had considered myself neutral. I had wanted neither side to win, neither the army nor the rebels. As it turned out, both sides lost.

V.S. Naipaul

#64. It is important not to trust people too much.

V.S. Naipaul

#65. 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

#66. I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world.

V.S. Naipaul

#67. The writer is all alone.

V.S. Naipaul

#68. It was a light which gave solidity to everything and drew colour out from the heart of objects.

V.S. Naipaul

#69. My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh.

V.S. Naipaul

#70. It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling ...

V.S. Naipaul

#71. How we flounder when emotion overtakes us.

V.S. Naipaul

#72. An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.

V.S. Naipaul

#73. 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

#74. I thought: How dare you lecture me about history and loyalty, you slave? We have paid bitterly for people like you. Who have you ever been loyal to, apart from yourself and your family and your caste?

V.S. Naipaul

#75. When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.

V.S. Naipaul

#76. Women make up half the world; and I thought I had reached the stage where there was nothing in a woman's nakedness to surprise me. But I felt now as if I was experiencing anew, and seeing a woman for the first time.

V.S. Naipaul

#77. 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

#78. I'm my own writer. My material means I'm entirely separate.

V.S. Naipaul

#79. 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

#80. I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.

V.S. Naipaul

#81. Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.

V.S. Naipaul

#82. I knew there was something that separated me from Ferdinand and the life of the bush about me. And it was because I had no means in my day-to-day life of asserting this difference, of exhibiting my true self, that I fell into the stupidity of exhibiting my things.

V.S. Naipaul

#83. I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.

V.S. Naipaul

#84. In a cell like mine you very quickly become aware of your body. You can grow to hate your body. And your body is all you have: this was the curious thought that kept floating up through my rage.

V.S. Naipaul

#85. In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.

V.S. Naipaul

#86. A cat only has itself.

V.S. Naipaul

#87. I've never abandoned the novel.

V.S. Naipaul

#88. Whatever they say about going back to the beginning, they'll be interested in the car.

V.S. Naipaul

#89. Africa is not a fun place, you know. A fun place is somewhere that lifts the spirits, that cossets the senses. I don't think that can be said of the Africa I traveled in.

V.S. Naipaul

#90. Well, India is a country of nonsense. M. K. Gandhi

V.S. Naipaul

#91. All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.

V.S. Naipaul

#92. Small things can start us off in new ways of thinking, and I was started off by the postage stamps of our area.

V.S. Naipaul

#93. Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.

V.S. Naipaul

#94. I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.

V.S. Naipaul

#95. It was as Nazruddin had said, when I asked him about visas and he had said that bank notes were better. 'You can always get into those places. What is hard is to get out. That is a private fight. Everybody has to find his own way.

V.S. Naipaul

#96. 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

#97. Writers should provoke disagreement.

V.S. Naipaul

#98. 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

#99. 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

#100. I really wasn't equipped to be a writer when I left Oxford. But then I set out to learn. I've always had the highest regard for the craft. I've always felt it was work.

V.S. Naipaul