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

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.

V. S. Naipaul

I will say I am the sum of my books.

V. S. Naipaul

If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.

V. S. Naipaul

A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.

V. S. Naipaul

My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.

V. S. Naipaul

I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.

V. S. Naipaul

A cat only has itself.

V. S. Naipaul

I've never abandoned the novel.

V. S. Naipaul

Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand.

V. S. Naipaul

The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.

V. S. Naipaul

Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.

V. S. Naipaul

You need someone to see what you've done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what's gone into it.

V. S. Naipaul

In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.

V. S. Naipaul

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.

V. S. Naipaul

At school I had only admirers; I had no friends.

V. S. Naipaul

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.

V. S. Naipaul

The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.

V. S. Naipaul

As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.

V. S. Naipaul

I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.

V. S. Naipaul

Writing has to support itself.

V. S. Naipaul

Africa is not a fun place, you know. A fun place is somewhere that lifts the spirits, that cossets the senses. I don't think that can be said of the Africa I traveled in.

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