V. S. Naipaul Quotes

His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.

I often wonder what would have happened to me if I hadn't made that decision. I suppose I would have sunk. I suppose I would have found some kind of hole and tried to hide or pass. After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities. I would have hidden in my hole and been crippled by my sentimentality, doing what I was doing, and doing it well, but always looking for the wailing wall. And I would never have seen the world as the rich place that it is. You wouldn't have seen me here in Africa, doing what I do.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Small things start us in new ways of thinking

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.

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

Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.

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?

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

The writer is all alone.

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

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

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

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

But everything of value about me is in my books.

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.

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.

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.

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

It is important not to trust people too much.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I will say I am the sum of my books.

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

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'.

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 think when you see so many Hindu temples of the 10th century or earlier disfigured, defaced, you realise that something terrible happened. I feel the civilisation of that closed world was mortally wounded by those invasions the old world is destroyed. That has to be understood. Ancient Hindu India was destroyed.

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

The world is always in movement.

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.

Some lesser husbands built a latrine on the hillside.

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.