V. S. Naipaul Quotes

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V. S. Naipaul

Profession : Novelist

Birth : August 17, 1932

I read many things. I read to fill in my knowledge of the world.

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

My life is short. I can't listen to banality.

V. S. Naipaul

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

V. S. Naipaul

Africa has no future.

V. S. Naipaul

A cat only has itself.

V. S. Naipaul

If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don't express your disregard for the essence of the culture. It's a form of aggression.

V. S. Naipaul

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.

V. S. Naipaul

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

V. S. Naipaul

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.

V. S. Naipaul

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.

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

Nothing was made in Trinidad.

V. S. Naipaul

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.'

V. S. Naipaul

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.

V. S. Naipaul

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.

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

The longer I live the more convinced I become that one of the greatest honors we can confer on other people is to see them as they are, to recognize not only that they exist, but that they exist in specific ways and have specific realities.

V. S. Naipaul

At school I had only admirers; I had no friends.

V. S. Naipaul

Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it's complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he's able to keep processing that as well.

V. S. Naipaul