V. S. Naipaul 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

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

Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it's complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he's able to keep processing that as well.

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

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

All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.

Argentine political life is like the life of an ant community or an African forest tribe: full of events, full of crisis and deaths, but life is always cyclical, and the year ends as it begins.

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.

It is important not to trust people too much.

How can you be an atheist and have an ideology to go with it? To be an atheist is to be free of some areas of belief. I don't see how that can become an ideology.

It's very attractive to people to be a victim. Instead of having to think out the whole situation, about history and your group and what you are doing... if you begin from the point of view of being a victim, you've got it half-made. I mean intellectually.

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.

What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material. And the fictional form was going to force you to do things with the material, to dramatize it in a certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to explore the world, the other world, the world that one didn't know fully.

I read many things. I read to fill in my knowledge of the world.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

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

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

The first 50 years of the cinema were absolutely great years. Original minds were at work establishing the ways to tell a story. And what is happening now is a copying, a pastiche-ing of what was done by great men.

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

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

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

It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut.

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

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

In Trinidad, where as new arrivals we were a disadvantaged community, that excluding idea was a kind of protection; it enabled us - for the time being, and only for the time being - to live in our own way and according to our own rules, to live in our own fading India.

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.

Africa is not a fun place, you know. A fun place is somewhere that lifts the spirits, that cossets the senses. I don't think that can be said of the Africa I traveled in.

I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.

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.'

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

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

You need someone to see what you've done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what's gone into it.

I will say I am the sum of my books.

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

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

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

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

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

Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.

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

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

If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms, break the forms.

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

Making a book is such a big enterprise.

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

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

There are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to.

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.

Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will - with luck - come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise

As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.

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.

Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.

I became very interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery.

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.

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.

One is made by all the things around one. There are many things that have made one. For a writer to go around looking for things that have made him is asking for trouble. It's like giving a character to yourself. Can't do it. Can't do it. These things are just there. Is that enough?

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 had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment.

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

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

In England people are very proud of being very stupid.

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

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

But everything of value about me is in my books.

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

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

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.

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

If a man begins writing at thirty, by the time he is fifty or sixty, the bulk of his work has been done. By the time he is eighty, he's got nothing more, you know?

I really wasn't equipped to be a writer when I left Oxford. But then I set out to learn. I've always had the highest regard for the craft. I've always felt it was work.

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.

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

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.

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.

In our island myth this was the prescribed end of marriages like mine: the wife goes off with someone from the Cercle Sportif, outside whose gates at night the willingly betrayed husband waits in his motorcar. The circumstances were slightly.

A businessman is someone who buys at ten and is happy to get out at twelve. The other kind of man buys at ten, sees it rise to eighteen and does nothing. He is waiting for it to rise to twenty. When it drops to two he waits for it to get back to ten.

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.

In the beginning, before the arrival of the white men, I had considered myself neutral. I had wanted neither side to win, neither the army nor the rebels. As it turned out, both sides lost.

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.

I have a very small public.

Look, boys, it ever strike you that the world not real at all? It ever strike you that we have the only mind in the world and you just thinking up everything else? Like me here, having the only mind in the world, and thinking up you people here, thinking up the war and all the houses and the ships and them in the harbour. That ever cross your mind?

Small things start us in new ways of thinking

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.

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.

It has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. 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'.

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

It isn't that there's no right and wrong here. There's no right.

How could people like these, without words to put to their emotions and passions, manage? They could, at best, only suffer dumbly. Their pains and humiliations would work themselves out in their characters alone: like evil spirits possessing a body, so that the body itself might appear innocent of what it did.

Some lesser husbands built a latrine on the hillside.

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

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

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

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