Naipaul Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Naipaul

Naipaul Quotes & Sayings

Happy to read and share the best inspirational Naipaul quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.

I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time. — V.S. Naipaul

We exchanged greetings, and in the African way we could make that take time. — V.S. Naipaul

Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe. — V.S. Naipaul

I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs. — V.S. Naipaul

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria. — V.S. Naipaul

If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris. — V.S. Naipaul

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

At school I had only admirers; I had no friends. — V.S. Naipaul

A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying. — V.S. Naipaul

I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea. — V.S. Naipaul

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

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

I have a very small public. — V.S. Naipaul

His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read. — V.S. Naipaul

My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world. — V.S. Naipaul

I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading. — V.S. Naipaul

Anybody can be decisive during a panic; it takes a strong man to act during a boom. — V.S. Naipaul

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

I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred. — V.S. Naipaul

Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes. — V.S. Naipaul

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading. (Naipaul...but it could be me if the thousands of tweets are anything to go by.) — Brian O'Hare

Paradise seemed further away than India, but Hell had become a bit closer — V.S. Naipaul

It was in that garage that Alec worked, no longer wearing red bodices or peeing blue, but doing mysterious greasy things. — V.S. Naipaul

It is important not to trust people too much. — V.S. Naipaul

It isn't that there's no right and wrong here. There's no right. — V.S. Naipaul

Like many isolated people, they were wrapped up in themselves and not too interested in the world outside. — V.S. Naipaul

Certain emotions bridge the years and link unlikely places. — V.S. Naipaul

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

The writer is all alone. — V.S. Naipaul

Writers should provoke disagreement. — V.S. Naipaul

How we flounder when emotion overtakes us. — V.S. Naipaul

A cat only has itself. — V.S. Naipaul

I've been a free man. — V.S. Naipaul

Africa has no future. — V.S. Naipaul

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

Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand. — V.S. Naipaul

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

The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate. — V.S. Naipaul

Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand. — V.S. Naipaul

The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves. — V.S. Naipaul

Writing has to support itself. — V.S. Naipaul

Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background. — V.S. Naipaul

The tragedy of power like mine is that there is no way down. There can only be extinction. Dust to dust; rags to rags; fear to fear. — V.S. Naipaul

The world is always in movement. — V.S. Naipaul

Whatever they say about going back to the beginning, they'll be interested in the car. — V.S. Naipaul

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

We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves. — V.S. Naipaul

I will say I am the sum of my books. — V.S. Naipaul

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

Out of every kind of nervousness I didn't move. — V.S. Naipaul

Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two. — V.S. Naipaul

I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people. — V.S. Naipaul

I'm my own writer. My material means I'm entirely separate. — V.S. Naipaul

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

I'm very content. — V.S. Naipaul

Nothing was made in Trinidad. — V.S. Naipaul

I knew the door I wanted. I knocked. — V.S. Naipaul

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

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

Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives. — V.S. Naipaul

I read many things. I read to fill in my knowledge of the world. — V.S. Naipaul

The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid people; and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and common. — V.S. Naipaul

I've never abandoned the novel. — V.S. Naipaul

A complying memory has obliterated many of them and edited my childhood down to a brief cinematic blur. — V.S. Naipaul

I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world. — V.S. Naipaul

to be among the ruins was to have your time-sense unsettled. — V.S. Naipaul

Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society. — V.S. Naipaul

My life is short. I can't listen to banality. — V.S. Naipaul

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

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

What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude. — V.S. Naipaul

The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing. — V.S. Naipaul

Well, India is a country of nonsense. M. K. Gandhi — V.S. Naipaul

Without always knowing what we were doing we were constantly adjusting to the arbitrariness by which we were surrounded. — V.S. Naipaul

Doing many more things until it seemed that ritual had replaced grief. — V.S. Naipaul

The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness. — V.S. Naipaul

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

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

Government that breaks its own laws can also easily break you. — V.S. Naipaul

The world is what it is: those who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it. — Sir Vidya Naipaul

It was a light which gave solidity to everything and drew colour out from the heart of objects. — V.S. Naipaul

We had become what the world outside had made us; we had to live in the world as it existed. — V.S. Naipaul

Where jargon turns living issues into abstractions, and where jargon ends by competing with jargon, people don't have causes. They only have enemies. — V.S. Naipaul

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

In England people are very proud of being very stupid. — V.S. Naipaul

Non-fiction can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies. — V.S. Naipaul

You would say that he felt that money had made him holy. — V.S. Naipaul

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

How ridiculous were the attentions the weak paid one another in the shadow of the strong! — V.S. Naipaul

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

The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill. — V.S. Naipaul

I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie. — V.S. Naipaul

All cultures have been mingled forever. — V.S. Naipaul

But everything of value about me is in my books. — V.S. Naipaul

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

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

All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right. — V.S. Naipaul

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

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

Everywhere else men are in movement, the world is in movement, and the past can only cause pain. — V.S. Naipaul