Words matter. These are the best V. S. Naipaul Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.’
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.
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.
But everything of value about me is in my books.
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.
I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people’s lands.
My life is short. I can’t listen to banality.
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.
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’m very content.
What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.
Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.
My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.
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.
Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
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.
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.
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.
I will say I am the sum of my books.
The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.
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.
Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.
I’ve never abandoned the novel.
Africans need to be kicked, that’s the only thing they understand.
All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.
The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
I’ve been a free man.
I’m thought to be a tough writer, but I’m really a softie.
I have a very small public.
The biography of a writer – or even the autobiography – will always have this incompleteness.
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.
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.
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.
Africa is not a fun place, you know. A fun place is somewhere that lifts the spirits, that cossets the senses. I don’t think that can be said of the Africa I traveled in.
I went to India and met some people who had been involved in this guerrilla business, middle-class people who were rather vain and foolish. There was no revolutionary grandeur to it. Nothing.
If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
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.
Writing has to support itself.
I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world.
When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.
How can you be an atheist and have an ideology to go with it? To be an atheist is to be free of some areas of belief. I don’t see how that can become an ideology.
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.
Making a book is such a big enterprise.
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.
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 don’t feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
Nothing was made in Trinidad.
Africa has no future.
In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
Home is, I suppose just a child’s idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.
One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.