V. S. Naipaul People Quotations

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

It is important not to trust people too much.

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

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

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

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.

To be a writer you have to be out in the world, you have to risk yourself in the world, you have to be immersed in the world, you have to go out looking for it. This becomes harder as you get older because there's less energy, the days are shorter for older people and it's not so easy to go out and immerse oneself in the world outside.

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.

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.

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

I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

In England people are very proud of being very stupid.

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

The longer I live the more convinced I become that one of the greatest honors we can confer on other people is to see them as they are, to recognize not only that they exist, but that they exist in specific ways and have specific realities.

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.

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.

People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.

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

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

Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.