V. S. Naipaul quotes - page 3

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. (V. S. Naipaul)
If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing. View quote
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. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
Writers should provoke disagreement. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
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. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
It is important not to trust people too much. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
Nothing was made in Trinidad. (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. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
I've never abandoned the novel. View quote
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. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
I also bought a copy of The New York Times, the previous day's issue of which I had seen the previous day in Puerto Rico. I was interested in newspapers and knew this paper to be one of the foremost in the world. But to read a newspaper for the first time is like coming into a film that has been on for an hour. Newspapers are like serials. To understand them you have to take knowledge to them; the knowledge that serves best is the knowledge provided by the newspaper itself. It made me feel a stranger, that paper. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
And whenever I saw Luis, Graça's husband, I dealt with him with a friendship that was quite genuine, since it was offered out of gratitude for Graça's love. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
Like many isolated people, they were wrapped up in themselves and not too interested in the world outside. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
The time before Islam is a time of blackness: that is part of Muslim theology. History has to serve theology. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
A writer is in the end not his books, but his myth. And that myth is in the keeping of others. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
It is like reading of a land periodically devastated by hordes of lemmings or locusts; it is like turning from the history of a coral reef, in which every act and every death is a foundation, to the depressing chronicle of a succession of castles built on the waste sand of the sea-shore. This is Woodruff on the difference between European history and Indian history. He has chosen his images well. But the sandcastle is not quite exact. The sandcastle is flattened by the tide and leaves not trace, and India is above all the land of ruins. (V. S. Naipaul)
While the Ottomans moved into South-East Europe, the Moghul invasion of India destroyed much of Hindu and Buddhist civilization there. The recent destruction by Moslems in Afghanistan of colossal Buddhist statues is a reminder of what happened to temples and shrines, on an enormous scale, when Islam took over. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
Religion now had to have its compartment, almost its social place. The frontier had ceased to exist. And the religions it had bred were beginning slowly to die. In the old days, when men, often of little education, had needed only to declare themselves ministers, people would have seen themselves reflected in the expounders of the Word. This quality of homespun would have made the religions appear creations of a community, personal and close and inviolable. Now a certain distance was needed. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
I thought how terrible it would have been if, as could so easily have happened, I had died without knowing this depth of satisfaction, this other person that I had just discovered within myself. It was worth any price, any consequence. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
Before comfort had been squeezed out of the hard land, like blood out of stone. View quote
V. S. Naipaul