Naipaul Quotes

She had a great many opinions , but taken together they did not add up to a point of view . ~ V.S. Naipaul

Ah, sahib. I know you just come to comfort a old man left to live by hisself. Soomintra say I too old-fashion. And Leela, she always by you. Why you don't sit down, sahib? It ain't dirty. Is just how it does look.'
Ganesh didn't sit down. 'Ramlogan, I come to buy over your taxis. ~ V.S. Naipaul

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria. ~ V.S. Naipaul

I read many things. I read to fill in my knowledge of the world. ~ V.S. Naipaul

If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing. ~ 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

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it ...
It wasn't only the sand drifts and the mud and the narrow, winding, broken roads up in the mountains. There was all that business at the frontier posts, all that haggling in the forest outside wooden huts that flew strange flags. I had to talk myself and my Peugeot past the men with guns
just to drive through bush and more bush. And then I had to talk even harder, and shed a few more bank notes and give away more of my tinned food, to get myself
and the Peugeot
out of the places I had talked us into.
Some of these palavers could take half a day ... ~ V.S. Naipaul

Anybody can be decisive during a panic; it takes a strong man to act during a boom. ~ V.S. Naipaul

All cultures have been mingled forever. ~ V.S. Naipaul

Narayan's novels did not prepare me for the distress of India. As a writer he had succeeded almost too well. His comedies were of the sort that requires a restricted social setting with well-defined rules; and he was so direct, his touch so light, that, though he wrote in English of Indian manners, he had succeeded in making those exotic manners quite ordinary. I did not lose my admiration for Narayan; but I felt that his comedy and irony were not quite what they had appeared to be, were part of a Hindu response to the world, a response I could no longer share. Narayan's novels are less the purely social comedies I had once taken them to be than religious books, at times religious fables, and intensely Hindu. ~ 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

In India: A Wounded Civilization, Naipaul writes that 'the Indian way of experiencing' means that 'the outer world matters only in so far as it affects the inner'. ~ Ian Jack

Life is a helluva thing. You can see trouble coming and you can't do a damn thing to prevent it coming. You just got to sit and watch and wait. ~ V.S. Naipaul

That life was full of rules. Too many rules; it was a prepacked kind of life. ~ V.S. Naipaul

They say that men should look at the mother of the girl they intend to marry," Yvette said. "Girls who did what I did should consider the wife a man has discarded or worn out, and know thye are not going to do much better. ~ V.S. Naipaul

The wines are Saccone and Speed,' he had said. It was a merchant's observation. He had meant that even there, in the centre of Africa, the wine had come from the shippers on our east coast, and not from the people on the other side. But in my imagination I allowed the words to stand for pure bliss. ~ V.S. Naipaul

What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material. And the fictional form was going to force you to do things with the material, to dramatize it in a certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to explore the world, the other world, the world that one didn't know fully. ~ V.S. Naipaul

In a cell like mine you very quickly become aware of your body. You can grow to hate your body. And your body is all you have: this was the curious thought that kept floating up through my rage. ~ V.S. Naipaul

For Shama and her sisters and women like them, ambition, if the word could be used, was a series of negatives; not to be unmaried, not to be childless, not to be an undutiful daughter, sister, wife, mother, widow. ~ 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

It isn't easy to turn your back on the past. It isn't something you can decide to do just like that. It is something you have to arm yourself for, or grief will ambush and destroy you. ~ V.S. Naipaul

Sebald, Naipaul, and Joyce are three of my biggest influences, all of them for their formal freedom and their ability to create mood. So those comparisons are immensely flattering and, of course, unearned. ~ Teju Cole

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

But this is madness. I am going in the wrong direction. There can't be a new life at the end of this. ~ V.S. Naipaul

A complying memory has obliterated many of them and edited my childhood down to a brief cinematic blur. ~ V.S. Naipaul

I have a very small public. ~ V.S. Naipaul

For years and years, even during the time of my first visit in 1962, it has been said that Calcutta was dying, that its port was silting up, its antiquated industry declining, but Calcutta hadn't died. It hadn't done much, but it had gone on; and it had begun to appear that the prophecy has been excessive. Now it occurred to me that perhaps this was what happened when cities died. They don't die with a bang; they didn't die only when they were abandoned. Perhaps, they died like this: when everybody was suffering, when transport was so hard that working people gave up jobs they needed because the fear the suffering of the travel; When no one had clean water or air; No one could go walking. Perhaps city died when they lost amenities that cities provided, the visual excitement, the heightened sense of human possibility, and became simply places where there were too many people, and people suffered. ~ 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

The world is what it is: those who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it. ~ Sir Vidya Naipaul

In my late thirties the dream of disappointment and exhaustion had been the dream of the exploding head: the dream of a noise in my head so loud and long that I felt with the brain that survived that the brain could not survive; that this was death. Now, in my early fifties, after my illness, after I had left the manor cottage and put an end to that section of my life, I began to be awakened by thoughts of death, the end of things; and sometimes not even by thoughts so specific, not even by fear rational or fantastic, but by a great melancholy. This melancholy penetrated my mind while I slept; and then, when I awakened in response to its prompting, I was so poisoned by it, made so much not a doer (as men must be, every day of their lives), that it took the best part of the day to shake it off. And that wasted or dark day added to the gloom preparing for the night. ~ V.S. Naipaul

He spoke about Africa in an unusual way. He spoke of Africa as though Africa was a sick child and he was the parent. ~ V.S. Naipaul

She was without memory: Roche had decided that some time ago. She was without consistency or even coherence. She knew only what she was and what she had been born to; to this knowledge she was tethered; it was her stability, enabling her to adventure in security. Adventuring, she was indifferent, perhaps blind, to the contradiction between what she said and what she was so secure of being; and this indifference or blindness, this absence of the sense of the absurd, was part of her unavailability. ~ V.S. Naipaul

I felt his pain as an extra pressure on myself. I mentally added his pain to mine, made it part of my own. ~ V.S. Naipaul

And in India it was necessary to take people's feelings into consideration. ~ V.S. Naipaul

I think when you see so many Hindu temples of the 10th century or earlier disfigured, defaced, you realise that something terrible happened. I feel the civilisation of that closed world was mortally wounded by those invasions the old world is destroyed. That has to be understood. Ancient Hindu India was destroyed. ~ V.S. Naipaul

To be a writer you have to be out in the world, you have to risk yourself in the world, you have to be immersed in the world, you have to go out looking for it. This becomes harder as you get older because there's less energy, the days are shorter for older people and it's not so easy to go out and immerse oneself in the world outside. ~ V.S. Naipaul

Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand. ~ V.S. Naipaul

How terrible it would have been, at this time, to be without it; to have died among the Tulsis, amid the squalour of that large, disintegrating and indifferent family; to have left Shama and the children among them, in one room; or worse, to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one's portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated. ~ V.S. Naipaul

I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time. ~ V.S. Naipaul

Nothing was made in Trinidad. ~ V.S. Naipaul

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. ~ V.S. Naipaul

Well, India is a country of nonsense. M. K. Gandhi ~ V.S. Naipaul

One must always try to see the truth of a situation - it makes things universal. ~ 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 get to twenty. The beauty of numbers. When it drops to ten again he waits for it to get back to eighteen. When it drops to two he waits for it to get back to ten. Well, it gets back there. But he has wasted a quarter of his life. And all he's got out of his money is a little mathematical excitement. ~ V.S. Naipaul

It was in that garage that Alec worked, no longer wearing red bodices or peeing blue, but doing mysterious greasy things. ~ V.S. Naipaul

But I thought: That is the sound of war. That sound of a steady, grinding machine made me think of guns; and then I thought of the crazed and half-starved village people against whom the guns were going to be used, people whose rags were already the colour of ashes. This was the anxiety of a moment of wakefulness; I fell asleep again. When ~ V.S. Naipaul

It was only after I'd grown up and left that I developed an attitude [towards the South]. And at first my attitude was that I was ashamed of it. But the older I got the more I realize that the transgressions of the South were the transgressions of mankind, and that there were certain things that were superior. There is a cultural attitude in the South that embraces respect for family ... and in some ways for country. Although patriotism is not among the highest virtues on my list, still, the patriot believes in something larger than himself, and it is therefore a virtue. There is an attitude in the South that there is more to life than the moment. ~ V.S. Naipaul

Out of every kind of nervousness I didn't move. ~ V.S. Naipaul

My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world. ~ 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

I became very interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery. ~ V.S. Naipaul

How we flounder when emotion overtakes us. ~ V.S. Naipaul

But everything of value about me is in my books. ~ V.S. Naipaul

We had become what the world outside had made us; we had to live in the world as it existed. ~ V.S. Naipaul

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. ((p. 62, Reading & Writing) ~ V.S. Naipaul

The writer is all alone. ~ 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

One is made by all the things around one. There are many things that have made one. For a writer to go around looking for things that have made him is asking for trouble. It's like giving a character to yourself. Can't do it. Can't do it. These things are just there. Is that enough? ~ 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

Though no one recognized his strength, Anand was among the strong. His satirical sense kept him aloof. At first this was only a pose, and imitation of his father. But satire led to contempt, and at Shorthills contempt, quick, deep, inclusive, became part of his nature. It led to inadequacies, to self-awareness and a lasting loneliness. But it made him unassailable. ~ V.S. Naipaul

I would say to her, in that mixed river language we used, 'One day, Beth, somebody will snatch your case. It isn't safe to travel about with money like that.' 'The day that happens, Mis' Salim, I will know the time has come to stay home.' It was a strange way of thinking. But she was a strange woman. ~ V.S. Naipaul

We have nothing. We solace ourselves with the great men of our tribe, the Gandhi and the Nehru, and we castrate ourselves. 'Here, take my manhood and invest it for me. Take my manhood and be a greater man yourself, for my sake! ~ V.S. Naipaul

In his original design the solicitor's clerk seemed to have forgotten the need for a staircase to link both the floors, and what he had provided had the appearance of an afterthought. Doorways had been punched in the eastern wall and a rough wooden staircase - heavy planks on an uneven frame with one warped unpainted banister, the whole covered with a sloping roof of corrugated iron - hung precariously at the back of the house, in striking contrast with the white-pointed brickwork of the front, the white woodwork and the frosted glass of doors and windows.
For this house Mr.Biswas had paid five thousand five hundred dollars. ~ V.S. Naipaul

He read political books. They gave him phrases which he could only speak to himself and use on Shama. They also revealed one region after another of misery and injustice and left him feeling more helpless and more isolated than ever. Then it was that he discovered the solace of Dickens. Without difficulty he transferred characters and settings to people and places he knew. In the grotesques of Dickens everything he feared and suffered from was ridiculed and diminished, so that his own anger, his own contempt became unnecessary, and he was given strength to bear the most difficult part of his day: dressing in the morning, that daily affirmation of faith in oneself, which at times for him was almost like an act of sacrifice. ~ V.S. Naipaul

Great writing can be done in biography, history, art. ~ V.S. Naipaul

Small things start us in new ways of thinking ~ V.S. Naipaul

All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right. ~ V.S. Naipaul

I've been a free man. ~ V.S. Naipaul

There are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to. ~ V.S. Naipaul

In what was happening now there was still that element of popular frenzy; but it was also clear that it was more organized, or that at least it had some deeper principle. ~ V.S. Naipaul

In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon. ~ V.S. Naipaul

It's very attractive to people to be a victim. Instead of having to think out the whole situation, about history and your group and what you are doing ... if you begin from the point of view of being a victim, you've got it half-made. I mean intellectually. ~ V.S. Naipaul

Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes. ~ V.S. Naipaul

You need someone to see what you've done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what's gone into it. ~ V.S. Naipaul

Man doesn't realize his real purpose on earth so long as he rolls in comforts. It is absolutely true that adversity teaches a man a bitter lesson, toughens his fiber and moulds his character. In other words, an altogether new man is born out of adversity which helpfully destroys one's ego and makes one humble and selfless. Prolonged suffering opens the eyes to hate the things for which one craved before unduly, leading eventually even to a state of resignation. It then dawns on us that continued yearnings brings us intense agony. But the stoic mind is least perturbed by the vicissitudes of life. It is well within our efforts to conquer grief. It's simple. Develop an attitude of detachment even while remaining in the thick of terrestrial pleasures. ~ V.S. Naipaul

With our cynicism, created by years of insecurity, how did we look on men? We judged the salesmen in the van der Weyden by the companies they represented, their ability to offer us concessions. Knowing such men, having access to the services they offered, and being flattered by them that we were not ordinary customers paying the full price or having to take our place in the queue, we thought we had mastered the world. ~ 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

If a man begins writing at thirty, by the time he is fifty or sixty, the bulk of his work has been done. By the time he is eighty, he's got nothing more, you know? ~ V.S. Naipaul

For when one thinks of Guiana one thinks of a country whose inadequate resources are strained in every way, a country whose geography imposes on it an administration and a programme of public works out of all proportion to its revenue and population. One thinks of the sea-wall, forever being breached and repaired; the dikes made of mud for want of money; the dirt roads and their occasional experimental surfacing; the roads that are necessary but not yet made; the decadent railways ('Three-fourths of the passenger rolling stock,' says a matter-of-fact little note in the government paper on the Development Programme, 'is old and nearing the point beyond which further repairs will be impossible'); the three overworked Dakotas and two Grumman seaplanes of British Guiana Airways. And one thinks of the streets of Albouystown, as crowded with children as a schoolyard during recess. ~ V.S. Naipaul

Whatever they say about going back to the beginning, they'll be interested in the car. ~ V.S. Naipaul

The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate. ~ V.S. Naipaul

When things went wrong they had the consolations of religion. This wasn't just a readiness to accept Fate; this was a quiet and profound conviction about the vanity of all human endeavour. ~ V.S. Naipaul

If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead. ~ V.S. Naipaul

Anand, look at the back of my hands. No hair. The sign of an advanced race, boy. And look at yours. No hair either. But you never know. With some of your mother's bad blood flowing in your veins you could wake up one morning and find yourself hairy like a monkey ~ V.S. Naipaul

I knew there was something that separated me from Ferdinand and the life of the bush about me. And it was because I had no means in my day-to-day life of asserting this difference, of exhibiting my true self, that I fell into the stupidity of exhibiting my things. ~ V.S. Naipaul

I forgot my fear. In this way fear, the feeling that everything could at any moment go, became background, a condition of life, something you had to accept. ~ V.S. Naipaul

Making a book is such a big enterprise. ~ V.S. Naipaul

Conrad,Nabokov, Naipaul - these are writers known for having managed to migrate between languages, cultures, countries, continents, even civilizations. Their imaginations were fed by exile, a nourishment drawn not through roots but through rootlessness. My imagination however, requires that I stay in the same street, in the same house, gazing at the same view. Istanbul's fate is my fate. I am attached to this city because it has made me who I am. ~ Orhan Pamuk

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. ~ V.S. Naipaul

Not the first time. I didn't think my heart could stand it. But the airplane is a wonderful thing. You are still in one place when you arrive at the other. The airplane is faster than the heart. You arrive quickly and you leave quickly. You don't grieve too much. And there is something else about the airplane. You can go back many times to the same place. And something strange happens if you go back often enough. You stop grieving for the past. You see that the past is something in your mind alone, that it doesn't exist in real life. You trample on the past, you crush it. In the beginning it is like trampling on a garden. In the end you are just walking on ground. That is the way we have to learn to live now. The past is here." He touched his heart. "It isn't there." And he pointed at the dusty road. I ~ V.S. Naipaul

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

My life is short. I can't listen to banality. ~ V.S. Naipaul

I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world. ~ V.S. Naipaul

It isn't that there's no right and wrong here. There's no right. ~ V.S. Naipaul

Without always knowing what we were doing we were constantly adjusting to the arbitrariness by which we were surrounded. ~ V.S. Naipaul

I wish my prose to be transparent-I don't want the reader to stumble over me; I want him to look through what I'm saying to what I'm describing. I don't want him ever to say, Oh, goodness, how nicely written this is. That would be a failure. ~ V.S. Naipaul

I've never abandoned the novel. ~ V.S. Naipaul

I knew the door I wanted. I knocked. ~ V.S. Naipaul

The tragedy of power like mine is that there is no way down. There can only be extinction. Dust to dust; rags to rags; fear to fear. ~ 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