V. S. Naipaul quotes

V. S. Naipaul was a Trinidadian-British writer, renowned for his novels and explorations of postcolonial identity. His work delved into the complexities of displacement, cultural conflict, and the legacy of empire. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature and is celebrated for his incisive, sometimes controversial, literary voice. Here are 121 of his quotes:

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria. (V. S. Naipaul)

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

V. S. Naipaul

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

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

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

Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.

V. S. Naipaul

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

V. S. Naipaul

The family feuds or the village feuds often had to do with an idea of honor. Perhaps it was a peasant idea; perhaps this idea of honor is especially important to a society without recourse to law or without confidence in law.

V. S. Naipaul

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

V. S. Naipaul

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.

V. S. Naipaul

I will say I am the sum of my books. (V. S. Naipaul)

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.

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

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

V. S. Naipaul

Africa has no future.

V. S. Naipaul

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.

V. S. Naipaul

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

V. S. Naipaul

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

V. S. Naipaul

But everything of value about me is in my books.

V. S. Naipaul

I could scarcely bear to look at her eyes. They promised such intimacies.

V. S. Naipaul

Life doesn't have a neat beginning and a tidy end, life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should be all there. (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

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

V. S. Naipaul

His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.

V. S. Naipaul

India is for me a difficult country. It isn't my home and cannot be my home; and yet I cannot reject it or be indifferent to it; I cannot travel only for the sights. I am at once too close and too far.

V. S. Naipaul

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V. S. Naipaul

V. S. Naipaul - Image

Photo: Faizul Latif Chowdhury, CC BY-SA 4.0

Occupation: Trinidadian Novelist
Born: August 17, 1932
Died: August 11, 2018
Quotes count: 121
Wikipedia: V. S. Naipaul

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