Top 180 V.S. Naipaul Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.”

— V.S. Naipaul

52. “Some lesser husbands built a latrine on the hillside.”

— V.S. Naipaul

53. “I really wasn’t equipped to be a writer when I left Oxford. But then I set out to learn. I’ve always had the highest regard for the craft. I’ve always felt it was work.”

— V.S. Naipaul

54. “One must always try to see the truth of a situation – it makes things universal.”

— V.S. Naipaul

55. “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

56. “All landscapes eventually turn to land, the gold of the imagination to the lead of reality.”

— V.S. Naipaul

57. “You can’t deny what you’ve learned; you can’t deny your travels; you can’t deny the nature of your life.”

— V.S. Naipaul

58. “But I thought: That is the sound of war. That sound of a steady, grinding machine made me think of guns; and then I thought of the crazed and half-starved village people against whom the guns were going to be used, people whose rags were already the colour of ashes. This was the anxiety of a moment of wakefulness; I fell asleep again. When.”

— V.S. Naipaul

59. “We have nothing. We solace ourselves with the great men of our tribe, the Gandhi and the Nehru, and we castrate ourselves. ‘Here, take my manhood and invest it for me. Take my manhood and be a greater man yourself, for my sake!”

— V.S. Naipaul

60. “How ridiculous were the attentions the weak paid one another in the shadow of the strong!”

— V.S. Naipaul

61. “Small things can start us off in new ways of thinking, and I was started off by the postage stamps of our area.”

— V.S. Naipaul

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

— V.S. Naipaul

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

— V.S. Naipaul

64. “A departure can feel like a desertion, a judgement on the place and people left behind.”

— V.S. Naipaul

65. “And in India it was necessary to take people’s feelings into consideration.”

— V.S. Naipaul

66. “It is well that Indians are unable to look at their country directly, for the distress they would see would drive them mad. And it is well that they have no sense of history, for how then would they be able to continue to squat amid their ruins, and which Indian would be able to read the history of his country for the last thousand years without anger and pain? It is better to retreat into fantasy and fatalism, to trust to the stars in which the fortunes of all are written.”

— V.S. Naipaul

67. “To read a newspaper for the first time is like coming into a film that has been on for an hour. Newspapers are like serials. To understand them you have to take knowledge to them; the knowledge that serves best is the knowledge provided by the newspaper itself.”

— V.S. Naipaul

68. “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

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

— V.S. Naipaul

70. “If it was Europe that gave us on the coast some idea of our history, it was Europe, I feel, that also introduced us to the lie.”

— V.S. Naipaul

71. “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 Nepal.”

— V.S. Naipaul

72. “Reality is always separate from the ideal; but in Trinidad this fantasy is a form of masochism and is infinitely more cheating than the fantasy which makes the poor delight in films about rich or makes the English singer use and American accent.”

— V.S. Naipaul

73. “The weeks before he died, Mr Mohun Biswas, a journalist of Sikkim Street, St James, Port of Spain, was sacked. He had been ill for some time. In less than a year he had spent more than nine weeks at the Colonial Hospital and convalesced at home for even longer. When the doctor advised him to take a complete rest the ‘Trinidad Sentinel’ had no choice. It gave Mr Biswas three months’ notice and continued, up to the time of his death, to supply him every morning with a free copy of the paper.”

— V.S. Naipaul

74. “In England people are very proud of being very stupid.”

— V.S. Naipaul

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

— V.S. Naipaul

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

— V.S. Naipaul

77. “I forgot my fear. In this way fear, the feeling that everything could at any moment go, became background, a condition of life, something you had to accept.”

— V.S. Naipaul

78. “Certain emotions bridge the years and link unlikely places.”

— V.S. Naipaul

79. “I’m my own writer. My material means I’m entirely separate.”

— V.S. Naipaul

80. “When things went wrong they had the consolations of religion. This wasn’t just a readiness to accept Fate; this was a quiet and profound conviction about the vanity of all human endeavour.”

— V.S. Naipaul

81. “A cat only has itself.”

— V.S. Naipaul

82. “Making a book is such a big enterprise.”

— V.S. Naipaul

83. “The wines are Saccone and Speed,’ he had said. It was a merchant’s observation. He had meant that even there, in the centre of Africa, the wine had come from the shippers on our east coast, and not from the people on the other side. But in my imagination I allowed the words to stand for pure bliss.”

— V.S. Naipaul

84. “To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn’t know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.”

— V.S. Naipaul

85. “In our island myth this was the prescribed end of marriages like mine: the wife goes off with someone from the Cercle Sportif, outside whose gates at night the willingly betrayed husband waits in his motorcar. The circumstances were slightly.”

— V.S. Naipaul

86. “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

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

— V.S. Naipaul

88. “In the beginning, before the arrival of the white men, I had considered myself neutral. I had wanted neither side to win, neither the army nor the rebels. As it turned out, both sides lost.”

— V.S. Naipaul

89. “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

90. “The man from Beirut came in and watched. He stood beside Hans. Then he stood beside the furniture-maker and whispered to him in English, their secret language. ‘The guy’s locked himself in the cabin.”

— V.S. Naipaul

91. “Everywhere else men are in movement, the world is in movement, and the past can only cause pain.”

— V.S. Naipaul

92. “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

93. “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

94. “A complying memory has obliterated many of them and edited my childhood down to a brief cinematic blur.”

— V.S. Naipaul

95. “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 our own fading India.”

— V.S. Naipaul

96. “In fact, the only person who seemed to examine the event with some astonishment was myself, who marvelled that such a turn in my life could occur so easily.”

— V.S. Naipaul

97. “I knew the door I wanted. I knocked.”

— V.S. Naipaul

98. “That life was full of rules. Too many rules; it was a prepacked kind of life.”

— V.S. Naipaul

99. “Anybody can be decisive during a panic; it takes a strong man to act during a boom.”

— V.S. Naipaul

100. “My wish for an adventure with Yvette was a wish to be taken up to the skies, to be removed from the life I had – the dullness, the pointless tension, ‘the situation of the country’. It wasn’t a wish to be involved with people as trapped as myself.”

— V.S. Naipaul