Vs 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 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. I'm very content.

V.S. Naipaul

#6. 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

#7. 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

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

V.S. Naipaul

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

V.S. Naipaul

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

V.S. Naipaul

#11. 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

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

V.S. Naipaul

#13. 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

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

V.S. Naipaul

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

V.S. Naipaul

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

V.S. Naipaul

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. I have a very small public.

V.S. Naipaul

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

V.S. Naipaul

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

V.S. Naipaul

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people.

V.S. Naipaul