V. S. Naipaul Quotes
-
There are certain things that are too painful for people to even write about sometimes, and there are certain things that are too hard to read about again.
-
Nothing was made in Trinidad.
-
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.
-
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.
-
But everything of value about me is in my books.
-
Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.
-
I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
-
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.
-
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?
-
I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
-
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.
-
In England people are very proud of being very stupid.
-
I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.
-
Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
-
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.
-
I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
-
I could scarcely bear to look at her eyes. They promised such intimacies.
-
If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms, break the forms.
-
I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands.
-
Making a book is such a big enterprise.
-
Life doesn't have a neat beginning and a tidy end, life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should be all there.
-
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.'
-
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.
-
And whenever I saw Luis, Graça's husband, I dealt with him with a friendship that was quite genuine, since it was offered out of gratitude for Graça's love.