Top 180 V.S. Naipaul Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Without always knowing what we were doing we were constantly adjusting to the arbitrariness by which we were surrounded.”

— V.S. Naipaul

102. “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

103. “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

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

— V.S. Naipaul

105. “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

106. “We had become what the world outside had made us; we had to live in the world as it existed.”

— V.S. Naipaul

107. “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

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

— V.S. Naipaul

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “It made smuggling easy; but I was nervous of getting involved, because a government that breaks its own laws can also easily break you.”

— V.S. Naipaul

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

— V.S. Naipaul

122. “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

123. “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

124. “Writers should provoke disagreement.”

— V.S. Naipaul

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

— V.S. Naipaul

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

— V.S. Naipaul

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

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

— V.S. Naipaul

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

— V.S. Naipaul

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

— V.S. Naipaul

133. “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

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

— V.S. Naipaul

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

— V.S. Naipaul

136. “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

137. “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

138. “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

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

— V.S. Naipaul

140. “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

141. “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

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

— V.S. Naipaul

143. “He was, after all, like other high officials. I wondered why I thought he would be different. These men, who depended on the President’s favour for everything, were bundles of nerves. The great power they excercised went with a constant fear of being destroyed.”

— V.S. Naipaul

144. “Out of every kind of nervousness I didn’t move.”

— V.S. Naipaul

145. “You would say that he felt that money had made him holy.”

— V.S. Naipaul

146. “Whatever they say about going back to the beginning, they’ll be interested in the car.”

— V.S. Naipaul

147. “Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.”

— V.S. Naipaul

148. “I knew there was something that separated me from Ferdinand and the life of the bush about me. And it was because I had no means in my day-to-day life of asserting this difference, of exhibiting my true self, that I fell into the stupidity of exhibiting my things.”

— V.S. Naipaul

149. “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

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

— V.S. Naipaul