V.S. Naipaul quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by V.S. Naipaul

V.S. Naipaul Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from V.S. Naipaul on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.

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

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

Some lesser husbands built a latrine on the hillside.

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

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

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

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.

I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.

At school I had only admirers; I had no friends.

After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.

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

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

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.

A celestial camera recorded my every movement, impartially, without judgement or pity. I was marked; I was of interest; I would survive.

I have a very small public.

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

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

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.

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

Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.

I will say I am the sum of my books.

But this is madness. I am going in the wrong direction. There can't be a new life at the end of this.

The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.

He spoke about Africa in an unusual way. He spoke of Africa as though Africa was a sick child and he was the parent.

That was the best time. The last day, the day of leaving. It was a good journey. It became different at the other end.

Out of every kind of nervousness I didn't move.

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

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

I'm very content.

Nothing was made in Trinidad.

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.

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

It is important not to trust people too much.

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

Attributed the decay of Hindu society in Trinidad to the rise of the timorous, weak, non-beating class of husband.

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

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

More than England to the British West Indian or even Holland to the Surinamer, France is the mother country to the Martiniquan.

Found, to his surprise, that he had put an end to their threats.

I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.

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

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.

If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.

I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands.

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

The world is always in movement.

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

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

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

Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand.

The President's white men, the promise of order and continuity; and it was oddly comforting, like the sound of rain in the night.

I've been a free man.

Writing has to support itself.

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

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.

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

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

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..

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.

I've never abandoned the novel.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Doing many more things until it seemed that ritual had replaced grief.

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

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

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

Government that breaks its own laws can also easily break you.

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

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

The writer is all alone.

Writers should provoke disagreement.

A cat only has itself.

Certain emotions bridge the years and link unlikely places.

The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.

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

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

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

I felt his pain as an extra pressure on myself. I mentally added his pain to mine, made it part of my own.

Paradise seemed further away than India, but Hell had become a bit closer

Africa has no future.

You would say that he felt that money had made him holy.

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.

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

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.

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

All cultures have been mingled forever.

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.

You can't deny what you've learned; you can't deny your travels; you can't deny the nature of your life.