V. S. Naipaul Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

View all V. S. Naipaul Quotes
One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

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

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

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

V. S. Naipaul
The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
We pretended to be real, to be learning, to be preparing ourselves for life, we mimic men of the New World.
'Ralph Singh''s words

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

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 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
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
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
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
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
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