V.S. Naipaul Quotes & Sayings

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

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. — V.S. Naipaul

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

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

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

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

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

But I thought: That is the sound of war. That sound of a steady, grinding machine made me think of guns; and then I thought of the crazed and half-starved village people against whom the guns were going to be used, people whose rags were already the colour of ashes. This was the anxiety of a moment of wakefulness; I fell asleep again. When — V.S. Naipaul

In my late thirties the dream of disappointment and exhaustion had been the dream of the exploding head: the dream of a noise in my head so loud and long that I felt with the brain that survived that the brain could not survive; that this was death. Now, in my early fifties, after my illness, after I had left the manor cottage and put an end to that section of my life, I began to be awakened by thoughts of death, the end of things; and sometimes not even by thoughts so specific, not even by fear rational or fantastic, but by a great melancholy. This melancholy penetrated my mind while I slept; and then, when I awakened in response to its prompting, I was so poisoned by it, made so much not a doer (as men must be, every day of their lives), that it took the best part of the day to shake it off. And that wasted or dark day added to the gloom preparing for the night. — V.S. Naipaul

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

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

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. — V.S. Naipaul

Making a book is such a big enterprise. — 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

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

The chaos lies all within. — V.S. Naipaul

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

It was not long after that Ganesh saw a big new notice in the shop, painted on cardboard.
'Is Leela self who write that,' Ramlogan said. 'I didn't ask she to write it, mind you. She just sit down quiet quiet one morning after tea and write it off.'
It read:

NOTICE
NOTICE, IS. HEREBY; PROVIDED: THAT, SEATS!
ARE, PROVIDED. FOR; FEMALE: SHOP, ASSISTANTS!

Ganesh said, 'Leela know a lot of punctuation marks.'
That is it, sahib. All day the girl just sitting down and talking about these puncturation marks. She is like that, sahib. — V.S. Naipaul

Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there. — V.S. Naipaul

I knew there was something that separated me from Ferdinand and the life of the bush about me. And it was because I had no means in my day-to-day life of asserting this difference, of exhibiting my true self, that I fell into the stupidity of exhibiting my things. — V.S. Naipaul

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

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

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. — 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

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

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

Out of all its squalor and human decay, its eruptions of butchery, India produced so many people of grace and beauty, ruled by elaborate courtesy. Producing too much life, it denied the value of life; yet it permitted a unique human development to so many. Nowhere were people so heightened, rounded and individualistic; nowhere did they offer themselves so fully and with such assurance. To know Indians was to take a delight in people as people; every encounter was an adventure. I did not want India to sink; the mere thought was painful. — V.S. Naipaul

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. — V.S. Naipaul

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. — V.S. Naipaul

I thought: How dare you lecture me about history and loyalty, you slave? We have paid bitterly for people like you. Who have you ever been loyal to, apart from yourself and your family and your caste? — V.S. Naipaul

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

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

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

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. — V.S. Naipaul

Always, sailing up from the south, from beyond the bend in the river, were clumps of water hyacinths, dark floating islands on the dark river, bobbing over the rapids. It was as if rain and river were tearing away bush from the heart of the continent and floating it down to the ocean, incalculable miles away. But the water hyacinth was the fruit of the river alone. The tall lilaccoloured flower had appeared only a few years before, and in the local language there was no word for it. The people still called it "the new thing" or "the new thing in the river," and to them it was another enemy. Its rubbery vines and leaves formed thick tangles of vegetation that adhered to the river banks and clogged up waterways. It grew fast, faster than men could destroy it with the tools they had. The channels to the villages had to be constantly cleared. Night and day the water hyacinth floated up from the south, seeding itself as it travelled. I — V.S. Naipaul

In what was happening now there was still that element of popular frenzy; but it was also clear that it was more organized, or that at least it had some deeper principle. — V.S. Naipaul

With our cynicism, created by years of insecurity, how did we look on men? We judged the salesmen in the van der Weyden by the companies they represented, their ability to offer us concessions. Knowing such men, having access to the services they offered, and being flattered by them that we were not ordinary customers paying the full price or having to take our place in the queue, we thought we had mastered the world. — V.S. Naipaul

The wines are Saccone and Speed,' he had said. It was a merchant's observation. He had meant that even there, in the centre of Africa, the wine had come from the shippers on our east coast, and not from the people on the other side. But in my imagination I allowed the words to stand for pure bliss. — V.S. Naipaul

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. — 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

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

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? — V.S. Naipaul

A cat only has itself. — V.S. Naipaul

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

To go back home was to play with impressions in this way, the way I played with the first pair of glasses I had, looking at a world now sharp and small and not quite real, now standard in size and real but blurred. — 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

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

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

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. — V.S. Naipaul

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. — V.S. Naipaul

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

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. — V.S. Naipaul

I find that the most difficult thing in prose narrative is linking one thing with the other. The link might just be a sentence, or even a word. It sums up what has gone before and prepares one for what is to come. — V.S. Naipaul

I'm very content. — V.S. Naipaul

We feel of the great world that it is simply there, something for the lucky ones among us to explore, and then only at the edges. It never occurs to us that we might make some contribution to it ourselves. And that is why we miss everything. When we land at a place like London airport we are concerned only not to appear foolish. It is more beautiful and more complex than anything we could have dreamed of, but we are concerned only to let people see that we can manage and are not overawed. — V.S. Naipaul

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

I would say to her, in that mixed river language we used, 'One day, Beth, somebody will snatch your case. It isn't safe to travel about with money like that.' 'The day that happens, Mis' Salim, I will know the time has come to stay home.' It was a strange way of thinking. But she was a strange woman. — V.S. Naipaul

They say that men should look at the mother of the girl they intend to marry," Yvette said. "Girls who did what I did should consider the wife a man has discarded or worn out, and know thye are not going to do much better. — V.S. Naipaul

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

To awaken to history was to cease to live instinctively. It was to begin to see oneself and one's group the way the outside world saw one; and it was to know a kind of rage. India was now full of this rage. There had been a general awakening. But everyone awakened first to his own group or community; every group thought itself unique in its awakening; and every group sought to separate its rage from the rage of other groups. — V.S. Naipaul

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. — V.S. Naipaul

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

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. — V.S. Naipaul

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

In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon. — V.S. Naipaul

Around, beyond the trees, were the buildings. There you really did have an idea of the city as something made by man, and not as something that had just grown by itself and was simply there. — V.S. Naipaul

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. — V.S. Naipaul

Anand, look at the back of my hands. No hair. The sign of an advanced race, boy. And look at yours. No hair either. But you never know. With some of your mother's bad blood flowing in your veins you could wake up one morning and find yourself hairy like a monkey — V.S. Naipaul

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

Found, to his surprise, that he had put an end to their threats. — V.S. Naipaul

I've been a free man. — V.S. Naipaul

As for the young man carrying the groceries, he was a thin, fair-skinned young man, and I would have said that he had been born in the house. He had the vacant, dog-like expressions that house-born slaves, as I remembered, liked to put on when they were in public with their masters and performing some simple task. This fellow was pretending that the Waitrose groceries were a great burden, but this was just an act, to draw attention to himself and the lady he served. He, too, had mistaken me for an Arab, and when we crossed he had dropped the burdened-down expression and given me a look of wistful inquisitiveness, like a puppy that wanted to play but had just been made to understand that it wasn't playtime. — V.S. Naipaul

To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn't know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up. — V.S. Naipaul

On the front cover of Newsweek reviews "A House for Mr. Biswas" as "a marvelous prose epic that matches the best 19th century novels for richness of comic insight and final, tragic power. — V.S. Naipaul

We have nothing. We solace ourselves with the great men of our tribe, the Gandhi and the Nehru, and we castrate ourselves. 'Here, take my manhood and invest it for me. Take my manhood and be a greater man yourself, for my sake! — V.S. Naipaul

After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities. — V.S. Naipaul

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

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

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

What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And
though played out forms can throw up miraculous sports like The Importance of Being Earnest or Decline and Fall
what is good is always what is new, in both form and content. What is good forgets whatever models it might have had, and is unexpected; we have to catch it on the wing. ((p. 62, Reading & Writing) — V.S. Naipaul

For the first time in his life he began to experience a kind of true pride. He felt himself, so to speak, taking up space when he walked in the streets; and he wondered whether this was how other people felt all the time, without effort, all the secure people he met in London and Africa. — 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

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. — V.S. Naipaul

Some lesser husbands built a latrine on the hillside. — V.S. Naipaul

Great writing can be done in biography, history, art. — V.S. Naipaul

It was only after I'd grown up and left that I developed an attitude [towards the South]. And at first my attitude was that I was ashamed of it. But the older I got the more I realize that the transgressions of the South were the transgressions of mankind, and that there were certain things that were superior. There is a cultural attitude in the South that embraces respect for family ... and in some ways for country. Although patriotism is not among the highest virtues on my list, still, the patriot believes in something larger than himself, and it is therefore a virtue. There is an attitude in the South that there is more to life than the moment. — V.S. Naipaul

He was, after all, like other high officials. I wondered why I thought he would be different. These men, who depended on the President's favour for everything, were bundles of nerves. The great power they excercised went with a constant fear of being destroyed. — V.S. Naipaul

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

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

... and it was extraordinary to me that some of the newspapers could have found good words for the butchery on the coast. But people are like that bout places in which they aren't really interested and where thy don't have to live. — V.S. Naipaul

On the white wall at the end of the room was a large oil painting of a European port, done in reds and yellows and blues. It was in slapdash modern style; the lady had painted it herself and signed it. She had given it pride of place in her main room. Yet she hadn't thought it worth the trouble of taking away. — V.S. Naipaul

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

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. — 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

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