V. S. Naipaul Quotes

48 Sourced Quotes

What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And- though played out forms can throw up miraculous sports like The Importance of Being Earnest or Decline and Fall- what is good is always what is new, in both form and content. What is good forgets whatever models it might have had, and is unexpected; we have to catch it on the wing.

V. S. Naipaul
How could people like these, without words to put to their emotions and passions, manage? They could, at best, only suffer dumbly. Their pains and humiliations would work themselves out in their characters alone: like evil spirits possessing a body, so that the body itself might appear innocent of what it did.

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

V. S. Naipaul
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
How terrible it would have been…to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one's portion of the earth; to have lived as one had been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated.

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.

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

V. S. Naipaul
Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there.

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.

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.

V. S. Naipaul
Look, boys, it ever strike you that the world not real at all? It ever strike you that we have the only mind in the world and you just thinking up everything else? Like me here, having the only mind in the world, and thinking up you people here, thinking up the war and all the houses and the ships and them in the harbour. That ever cross your mind?

V. S. Naipaul
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.

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

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

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

V. S. Naipaul
History is built around creation and achievement, and nothing was created in the West Indies.

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