Top 180 V.S. Naipaul Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Cruelty, yes: it was in the nature of Indian family life. The clan that gave protection and identity, and saved people from the void, was itself a little state, and it could be a hard place, full of politics, full of hatreds and changing alliances and moral denunciations. It was the kind of family life I had known for much of my childhood:...”

— V.S. Naipaul

102. “But everything of value about me is in my books.”

— V.S. Naipaul

103. “You couldn’t listen to sweet songs about injustice unless you expected justice and received it much of the time. You couldn’t sing songs about the end of the world unless-like the other people in that room, so beautiful with such simple things: African mats on the floor and African hangings on the wall and spears and masks-you felt that the world was going on and you were safe in it. How easy it was, in that room, to make those assumptions!”

— V.S. Naipaul

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

— V.S. Naipaul

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

— V.S. Naipaul

106. “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

107. “Without always knowing what we were doing we were constantly adjusting to the arbitrariness by which we were surrounded.”

— V.S. Naipaul

108. “Me black and beautiful’ was the first thing she taught me. Then she pointed to the policeman with the gun outside and taught me: ‘He pig.”

— V.S. Naipaul

109. “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

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

— V.S. Naipaul

111. “We heard of ambushes on roads we knew, of villages attacked, of headmen and officials killed. It was at this time that Mahesh said something which I remembered. It wasn’t the kind of thing I was expecting from him – so careful of his looks and clothes, so spoiled, so obsessed with his lovely wife. Mahesh said to me: “What do you do? You live here, and you ask that? You do what we all do. You carry on.”

— V.S. Naipaul

112. “I would say to her, in that mixed river language we used, ‘One day, Beth, somebody will snatch your case. It isn’t safe to travel about with money like that.’ ‘The day that happens, Mis’ Salim, I will know the time has come to stay home.’ It was a strange way of thinking. But she was a strange woman.”

— V.S. Naipaul

113. “He spoke about Africa in an unusual way. He spoke of Africa as though Africa was a sick child and he was the parent.”

— V.S. Naipaul

114. “I went to India and met some people who had been involved in this guerrilla business, middle-class people who were rather vain and foolish. There was no revolutionary grandeur to it. Nothing.”

— V.S. Naipaul

115. “But the people I found, the people I was attracted to were not unlike myself. They were trying to find order in their world, looking for the centre...”

— V.S. Naipaul

116. “One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.”

— V.S. Naipaul

117. “I had seen how deep in nearly every West Indian, high and low, were the prejudices of race; how often these prejudices were rooted in self-contempt; and how much important action they prompted. Everyone spoke of nation and nationalism but no one was willing to surrender the priviledges or even the separateness of his group.”

— V.S. Naipaul

118. “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

119. “It was as Nazruddin had said, when I asked him about visas and he had said that bank notes were better. ‘You can always get into those places. What is hard is to get out. That is a private fight. Everybody has to find his own way.”

— V.S. Naipaul

120. “There may be some part of the world – dead countries, or secure and by-passed ones – where men can cherish the past and think of passing on furniture and china to their heirs. Men can do that perhaps in Sweden or Canada.”

— V.S. Naipaul

121. “That was the best time. The last day, the day of leaving. It was a good journey. It became different at the other end.”

— V.S. Naipaul

122. “I had talked of Raymond’s pain when I was thinking of my own, and Yvette had talked of Raymond’s needs when was thinking of her won. We had begun to talk, if not in opposites, at least indirectly, lying and not lying, making those signals at the truth which people in certain situations find it necessary to make.”

— V.S. Naipaul

123. “In a cell like mine you very quickly become aware of your body. You can grow to hate your body. And your body is all you have: this was the curious thought that kept floating up through my rage.”

— V.S. Naipaul

124. “Change had come over him without his knowing. There had been no precise point at which the city had lost its romance and promise, no point at which he had begun to consider himself old, his career closed, and his visions of the future became only visions of Anand’s future. Each realization had been delayed and had come, not as a surprise, but as a statement of a condition long accepted.”

— V.S. Naipaul

125. “Writers should provoke disagreement.”

— V.S. Naipaul

126. “We exchanged greetings, and in the African way we could make that take time.”

— V.S. Naipaul

127. “Certain ideas overwhelm us by their simplicity.”

— V.S. Naipaul

128. “I felt his pain as an extra pressure on myself. I mentally added his pain to mine, made it part of my own.”

— V.S. Naipaul

129. “Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.”

— V.S. Naipaul

130. “In what was happening now there was still that element of popular frenzy; but it was also clear that it was more organized, or that at least it had some deeper principle.”

— V.S. Naipaul

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

— V.S. Naipaul

132. “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

133. “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. Those of us who had been in that part of Africa before the Europeans had never lied about ourselves. Not because we were moral. We didn’t lie because we never assessed ourselves and didn’t think there was anything for us to lie about; we were people who simply did what we did.”

— V.S. Naipaul

134. “If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.”

— V.S. Naipaul

135. “And so my satisfactions had only been brothel satisfactions, which hadn’t been satisfactions at all.”

— V.S. Naipaul

136. “If a writer knows everything that is going to happen, then his book is dead before he begins it.”

— V.S. Naipaul

137. “I don’t feel I can speak with authority for many other people.”

— V.S. Naipaul

138. “His attitude, since he had begun to feel towards a character, was that I owed him something, simply because I seemed willing to help.”

— V.S. Naipaul

139. “Because they could assess themselves, the Europeans were better equipped to cope with changes than we were.”

— V.S. Naipaul

140. “I’ve never abandoned the novel.”

— V.S. Naipaul

141. “Though it was a comfort on occasion to play with the idea that outside this place a whole life waited for me, all the relationships that bind a man to the earth and give him a feeling of having a place.”

— V.S. Naipaul

142. “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 get to twenty. The beauty of numbers. When it drops to ten again he waits for it to get back to eighteen. When it drops to two he waits for it to get back to ten. Well, it gets back there. But he has wasted a quarter of his life. And all he’s got out of his money is a little mathematical excitement.”

— V.S. Naipaul

143. “Though no one recognized his strength, Anand was among the strong. His satirical sense kept him aloof. At first this was only a pose, and imitation of his father. But satire led to contempt, and at Shorthills contempt, quick, deep, inclusive, became part of his nature. It led to inadequacies, to self-awareness and a lasting loneliness. But it made him unassailable.”

— V.S. Naipaul

144. “I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people’s lands.”

— V.S. Naipaul

145. “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

146. “To go back home was to play with impressions in this way, the way I played with the first pair of glasses I had, looking at a world now sharp and small and not quite real, now standard in size and real but blurred.”

— V.S. Naipaul

147. “I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs. You refer to yourself in order to understand other people. That’s the novelist’s gift, isn’t it?”

— V.S. Naipaul

148. “The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.”

— V.S. Naipaul

149. “I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.”

— V.S. Naipaul

150. “It is the first time I am in a church and I don’t like it. It is as though they are making me eat beef and pork. The flowers and the brass and the old smell and the body on the cross make me think of the dead. The funny taste is in my mouth, my old nausea, and I feel I would vomit if I swallow.”

— V.S. Naipaul