V. S. Naipaul Quotes
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The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
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The time before Islam is a time of blackness: that is part of Muslim theology. History has to serve theology.'
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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.
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A writer is in the end not his books, but his myth. And that myth is in the keeping of others.
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An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
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I have a very small public.
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The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.
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The world is always in movement.
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In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
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When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.
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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.
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I came to London. It had become the center of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost.
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The first 50 years of the cinema were absolutely great years. Original minds were at work establishing the ways to tell a story. And what is happening now is a copying, a pastiche-ing of what was done by great men.
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If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
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At school I had only admirers; I had no friends.
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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.
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A cat only has itself.
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Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.
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A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
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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.
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I will say I am the sum of my books.
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I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie.
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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.
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If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.