V.S. Naipaul Quotes

Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand.

I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.

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.

His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.

A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.

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.

Writing has to support itself.

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

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

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.

One must always try to see the truth of a situation - it makes things universal.

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.

I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.

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

Some lesser husbands built a latrine on the hillside.

I've never abandoned the novel.

In England I am not English, in India I am not Indian. I am chained to the 1,000 square miles that is Trinidad; but I will evade that fate yet.

I have a very small public.

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

I really wasn't equipped to be a writer when I left Oxford. But then I set out to learn. I've always had the highest regard for the craft. I've always felt it was work.

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

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

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.

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.

Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.

All cultures have been mingled forever.

You can't deny what you've learned; you can't deny your travels; you can't deny the nature of your life.

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

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.

I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands.

The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.

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

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.

Africa has no future.

In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.

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

I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people.

The writer is all alone.

I had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment.

A cat only has itself.

My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh.

If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.

I've been a free man.

Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.

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

Nothing was made in Trinidad.

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.

It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling...

It was a light which gave solidity to everything and drew colour out from the heart of objects.

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