Vs Naipaul Quotes

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

V.S. Naipaul

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

V.S. Naipaul

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

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

V.S. Naipaul

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

V.S. Naipaul

#9. I have a very small public.

V.S. Naipaul

#10. 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

#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. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

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

V.S. Naipaul

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

V.S. Naipaul

#19. 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

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

V.S. Naipaul

#21. 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

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

V.S. Naipaul

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

V.S. Naipaul

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

V.S. Naipaul

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. I'm very content.

V.S. Naipaul

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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