Top 44 V. S. Naipaul Quotes

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.

Africa has no future.

I will say I am the sum of my books.

Nothing was made in Trinidad.

I’m very content.

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.

In England people are very proud of being very stupid.

A cat only has itself.

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.

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 always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

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

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

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

Writing has to support itself.

The world is always in movement.

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

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

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 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 came to London. It had become the center of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

It is important not to trust people too much.

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.

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

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.

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 feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.

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