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.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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.

V. S. Naipaul

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 ou...

V. S. Naipaul

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

V. S. Naipaul

If a man begins writing at thirty, by the time he is fifty or sixty, the bulk of his work has been done. By the time he is eighty, he's got nothing more, you know?

V. S. Naipaul

It is important not to trust people too much.

V. S. Naipaul

When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.

V. S. Naipaul

Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.

V. S. Naipaul

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

V. S. Naipaul

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.

V. S. Naipaul

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.

V. S. Naipaul

The world is always in movement.

V. S. Naipaul

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 Ne...

V. S. Naipaul

I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.

V. S. Naipaul

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.

V. S. Naipaul

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.

V. S. Naipaul

An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.

V. S. Naipaul

If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.

V. S. Naipaul

I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.

V. S. Naipaul

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

V. S. Naipaul

If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.

V. S. Naipaul

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

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