V. S. Naipaul Quotes

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.

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

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

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.

Writers should provoke disagreement.

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

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.

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

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

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

A cat only has itself.

The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Out of 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 [out of my memory]; the mere thought was painful.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

Africa has no future.

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