Quotes by V. S. Naipaul

About V. S. Naipaul:

Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul is a Trinidad-born Nobel Prize-winning British writer known for his comic early novels set in Trinidad, his bleaker later novels of the wider world, and his autobiographical chronicles of life and travels. Naipaul has published more than 30 books, both of fiction and nonfiction, over some 50 years.
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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.

V. S. Naipaul

What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.

V. S. Naipaul

The writer is all alone.

V. S. Naipaul

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.

V. S. Naipaul

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

V. S. Naipaul

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

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

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.

V. S. Naipaul

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.

V. S. Naipaul

What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material. And the fictional form was going to force you to do things with the material, to dramatize it in a certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chan...

V. S. Naipaul

Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.

V. S. Naipaul

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

V. S. Naipaul

It's very attractive to people to be a victim. Instead of having to think out the whole situation, about history and your group and what you are doing... if you begin from the point of view of being a victim, you've got it half-made. I mean intellect...

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

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.

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 ...

V. S. Naipaul

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.

V. S. Naipaul

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

V. S. Naipaul

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.

V. S. Naipaul

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

V. S. Naipaul

Author Bio

  • NameV. S. Naipaul
  • DescriptionTrinidadian-British writer
  • BornAugust 17, 1932
  • CountryTrinidad And Tobago
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist; Journalist; Essayist
  • WorksA House For Mr Biswas; In A Free State; A Bend In The River; The Enigma Of Arrival
  • AwardsNobel Prize In Literature; John Llewellyn Rhys Prize