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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Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.

V. S. Naipaul

If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms, break the forms.

V. S. Naipaul

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.

V. S. Naipaul

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...

V. S. Naipaul

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.

V. S. Naipaul

To be a writer you have to be out in the world, you have to risk yourself in the world, you have to be immersed in the world, you have to go out looking for it. This becomes harder as you get older because there's less energy, the days are shorter fo...

V. S. Naipaul

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.

V. S. Naipaul

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.

V. S. Naipaul

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.

V. S. Naipaul

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 thing...

V. S. Naipaul

I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

V. S. Naipaul

But everything of value about me is in my books.

V. S. Naipaul

I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people.

V. S. Naipaul

Making a book is such a big enterprise.

V. S. Naipaul

I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world.

V. S. Naipaul

All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.

V. S. Naipaul

I have a very small public.

V. S. Naipaul

The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.

V. S. Naipaul

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

V. S. Naipaul

Nothing was made in Trinidad.

V. S. Naipaul

In England people are very proud of being very stupid.

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