V. S. Naipaul Quotes

48 Sourced Quotes

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

V. S. Naipaul
I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true. It might seem strange that a man who has dealt in words and emotions and ideas for nearly fifty years shouldn't have a few to spare, so to speak. But everything of value about me is in my books. 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. That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing.

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

V. S. Naipaul
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.

V. S. Naipaul
Before comfort had been squeezed out of the hard land, like blood out of stone.

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

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
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

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.

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
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.

V. S. Naipaul
Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.

V. S. Naipaul
What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.

V. S. Naipaul
Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.

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.

V. S. Naipaul
If it was Europe that gave us on the coast some idea of our history, it was Europe, I feel, that also introduced us to the lie.

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

V. S. Naipaul
I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.

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.

V. S. Naipaul
Where jargon turns living issues into abstractions, and where jargon ends by competing with jargon, people don't have causes. They only have enemies.

V. S. Naipaul
The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves.

V. S. Naipaul
In the beginning, before the arrival of the white men, I had considered myself neutral. I had wanted neither side to win, neither the army nor the rebels. As it turned out, both sides lost.

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

V. S. Naipaul
A businessman is someone who buys at ten and is happy to get out at twelve. The other kind of man buys at ten, sees it rise to eighteen and does nothing. He is waiting for it to rise to twenty. When it drops to two he waits for it to get back to ten.

V. S. Naipaul