V. S. Naipaul Quotes
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What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.
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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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I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world.
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All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.
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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.
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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
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You need someone to see what you've done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what's gone into it.
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This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true.
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The writer is all alone.
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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.
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Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
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Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.
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My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.
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I've never abandoned the novel.
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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.
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I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.
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Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
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If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.
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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.
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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.
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The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.
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I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
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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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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.