Top 180 V.S. Naipaul Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.”

— V.S. Naipaul

2. “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”

— V.S. Naipaul

3. “I will say I am the sum of my books.”

— V.S. Naipaul

4. “The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid people; and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and common.”

— V.S. Naipaul

5. “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

6. “The writer is all alone.”

— V.S. Naipaul

7. “Africa has no future.”

— V.S. Naipaul

8. “Small things start us in new ways of thinking.”

— V.S. Naipaul

9. “Life is a helluva thing. You can see trouble coming and you can’t do a damn thing to prevent it coming. You just got to sit and watch and wait.”

— V.S. Naipaul

10. “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.”

— V.S. Naipaul

11. “Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.”

— V.S. Naipaul

12. “It is important not to trust people too much.”

— V.S. Naipaul

13. “Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there.”

— V.S. Naipaul

14. “I thought: How dare you lecture me about history and loyalty, you slave? We have paid bitterly for people like you. Who have you ever been loyal to, apart from yourself and your family and your caste?”

— V.S. Naipaul

15. “It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That’s where the mischief starts. That’s where everything starts unravelling...”

— V.S. Naipaul

16. “After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.”

— V.S. Naipaul

17. “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

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

— V.S. Naipaul

19. “Where jargon turns living issues into abstractions, and where jargon ends by competing with jargon, people don’t have causes. They only have enemies.”

— V.S. Naipaul

20. “Nothing was made in Trinidad.”

— V.S. Naipaul

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

— V.S. Naipaul

22. “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

23. “It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.”

— V.S. Naipaul

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

— V.S. Naipaul

25. “Africans need to be kicked, that’s the only thing they understand.”

— V.S. Naipaul

26. “The biography of a writer – or even the autobiography – will always have this incompleteness.”

— V.S. Naipaul

27. “The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.”

— V.S. Naipaul

28. “My life is short. I can’t listen to banality.”

— V.S. Naipaul

29. “Women make up half the world; and I thought I had reached the stage where there was nothing in a woman’s nakedness to surprise me. But I felt now as if I was experiencing anew, and seeing a woman for the first time.”

— V.S. Naipaul

30. “The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves.”

— V.S. Naipaul

31. “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

32. “Well, India is a country of nonsense. M. K. Gandhi.”

— V.S. Naipaul

33. “How terrible it would have been, at this time, to be without it; to have died among the Tulsis, amid the squalour of that large, disintegrating and indifferent family; to have left Shama and the children among them, in one room; or worse, to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one’s portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated.”

— V.S. Naipaul

34. “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

35. “Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.”

— V.S. Naipaul

36. “The world is always in movement.”

— V.S. Naipaul

37. “It was a light which gave solidity to everything and drew colour out from the heart of objects.”

— V.S. Naipaul

38. “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

39. “A businessman is someone who buys at ten and is happy to get out at twelve. The other kind of man buys at ten, sees it rise to eighteen and does nothing. He is waiting for it to rise to twenty. When it drops to two he waits for it to get back to ten.”

— V.S. Naipaul

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

— V.S. Naipaul

41. “The chaos lies all within.”

— V.S. Naipaul

42. “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 of paths had been cut.”

— V.S. Naipaul

43. “I don’t know why they still building houses,” Mr Biswas said. “Nobody don’t want a house these days. They just want a coal barrel. One coal barrel for one person. Whenever a baby born just get another coal barrel. You wouldn’t see any houses anywhere then. Just a yard with five or six coal barrels standing up in two or three rows.”

— V.S. Naipaul

44. “Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.”

— V.S. Naipaul

45. “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

46. “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

47. “One isn’t born one’s self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people’s ideas – and you have to work through it all.”

— V.S. Naipaul

48. “His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.”

— V.S. Naipaul

49. “The family feuds or the village feuds often had to do with an idea of honor. Perhaps it was a peasant idea; perhaps this idea of honor is especially important to a society without recourse to law or without confidence in law.”

— V.S. Naipaul

50. “It isn’t easy to turn your back on the past. It isn’t something you can decide to do just like that. It is something you have to arm yourself for, or grief will ambush and destroy you.”

— V.S. Naipaul