Top 180 V.S. Naipaul Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Neither my father nor grandfather could put dates to their stories. Not because they had forgotten or were confused; the past was simply the past. I remember hearing from my grandfather that he had once shipped a boatful of slaves as a cargo of rubber. He couldn’t tell me when he had done this. It was just there in his memory, floating around, without date or other association, as an unusual event in an uneventful life.”

— V.S. Naipaul

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

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

— V.S. Naipaul

157. “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

158. “How we flounder when emotion overtakes us.”

— V.S. Naipaul

159. “The tragedy of power like mine is that there is no way down. There can only be extinction. Dust to dust; rags to rags; fear to fear.”

— V.S. Naipaul

160. “I find that the most difficult thing in prose narrative is linking one thing with the other. The link might just be a sentence, or even a word. It sums up what has gone before and prepares one for what is to come.”

— V.S. Naipaul

161. “In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.”

— V.S. Naipaul

162. “Whenever I have had to write fiction, I’ve always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.”

— V.S. Naipaul

163. “Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.”

— V.S. Naipaul

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

— V.S. Naipaul

165. “With our cynicism, created by years of insecurity, how did we look on men? We judged the salesmen in the van der Weyden by the companies they represented, their ability to offer us concessions. Knowing such men, having access to the services they offered, and being flattered by them that we were not ordinary customers paying the full price or having to take our place in the queue, we thought we had mastered the world.”

— V.S. Naipaul

166. “If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.”

— V.S. Naipaul

167. “But at night, if you were on the river, it was another thing. You felt the land taking you back to something that was familiar, something you had known at some time but had forgotten or ignored, but which was always there. You felt the land taking you back to what was there a hundred years ago, to what had been there always.”

— V.S. Naipaul

168. “I wondered that clothes, even the apparently revealing tropical clothes I had seen on Yvette, should have concealed so much, should have broken the body up, as it were, into separate parts and not really hinted at the splendour of the whole.”

— V.S. Naipaul

169. “Neither my father nor grandfather could put dates to their stories. Not because they had forgotten or were confused; the past was simply the past.”

— V.S. Naipaul

170. “When the man was totting up the fare, all the de luxe supplements, he worked the sum out twenty times on the adding machine. The same sum, twenty times. Why? Did he think the machine was going to change its mind?”

— V.S. Naipaul

171. “All cultures have been mingled forever.”

— V.S. Naipaul

172. “When we had come no one could tell me. We were not that kind of people. We simply lived; we did what was expected of us, what we had seen the previous generation do. We never asked why; we never recorded. We felt in our bones that we were a very old people; but we seemed to have no means of gauging the passing of time. Neither my father nor my grandfatehr could put dates to their stories. Not because they had forgotten or were confused; the past was simply the past.”

— V.S. Naipaul

173. “I have a very small public.”

— V.S. Naipaul

174. “But this is madness. I am going in the wrong direction. There can’t be a new life at the end of this.”

— V.S. Naipaul

175. “And how are you, Ferdinand?” “You don’t have to ask. You mustn’t think it’s bad just for you. It’s bad for everybody. That’s the terrible thing. It’s bad for Prosper, bad for the man they gave your shop to, bad for everybody. Nobody’s going anywhere.”

— V.S. Naipaul

176. “I’m thought to be a tough writer, but I’m really a softie.”

— V.S. Naipaul

177. “My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh.”

— V.S. Naipaul

178. “On the white wall at the end of the room was a large oil painting of a European port, done in reds and yellows and blues. It was in slapdash modern style; the lady had painted it herself and signed it. She had given it pride of place in her main room. Yet she hadn’t thought it worth the trouble of taking away.”

— V.S. Naipaul

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

— V.S. Naipaul

180. “The first 50 years of the cinema were absolutely great years. Original minds were at work establishing the ways to tell a story. And what is happening now is a copying, a pastiche-ing of what was done by great men.”

— V.S. Naipaul

181. “All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.”

— V.S. Naipaul

182. “I shared in the boom. I was energetic in my own modest way. But I was also restless. You so quickly get used to peace. It is like being well – you take it for granted, and forget that when you were ill to be well again had seemed everything. And with peace and the boom I began to see the town as ordinary, for the first time.”

— V.S. Naipaul

183. “Actually, we owe a great deal to those British officers and men and scholars who went deep into our literature, to translate the texts which the brahmins didn’t want known outside their own coterie.”

— V.S. Naipaul

184. “Writing has to support itself.”

— V.S. Naipaul

185. “A celestial camera recorded my every movement, impartially, without judgement or pity. I was marked; I was of interest; I would survive.”

— V.S. Naipaul

186. “It seemed as easy as that, if you came late to the world and found ready-made those things that other countries and peoples had taken so long to arrive at – writing, printing, universities, books, knowledge.”

— V.S. Naipaul

187. “Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.”

— V.S. Naipaul

188. “I’ve been a free man.”

— V.S. Naipaul

189. “We feel of the great world that it is simply there, something for the lucky ones among us to explore, and then only at the edges. It never occurs to us that we might make some contribution to it ourselves. And that is why we miss everything. When we land at a place like London airport we are concerned only not to appear foolish. It is more beautiful and more complex than anything we could have dreamed of, but we are concerned only to let people see that we can manage and are not overawed.”

— V.S. Naipaul

190. “Whereas before he had waited for me to ask questions, now it was he who put up little ideas, little debating points, as though he wanted to get a discussion going.”

— V.S. Naipaul

191. “Confronted with her, I shed old fantasies. My body obeyed its new impulses, discovered in itself resources that answered my new need.”

— V.S. Naipaul

192. “Perhaps he had made Africa his subject because he had come to Africa and because he was a scholar, used to working with papers, and had found this place full of new papers.”

— V.S. Naipaul

193. “What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.”

— V.S. Naipaul

194. “To be a devout Muslim was always to have distinctive things to do; it was to be guided constantly by rules; it was to live in a fever of the faith and always to be aware of the distinctiveness of the faith.”

— V.S. Naipaul

195. “She said, on another day, “I do think about the individuals involved, all of them and I sometimes wonder what they really felt at certain moments, I think all of them were very courageous people. Each of them displayed some kind of courage in making the changes that they did make.”

— V.S. Naipaul

196. “The businessman bought at ten and was happy to get out at twelve; the mathematician saw his ten rise to eighteen, but didn’t sell because he wanted to double his ten to twenty.”

— V.S. Naipaul

197. “The novel is part of that Western concern with the condition of men, a response to the here and now. In India, thoughtful men have preferred to turn their backs on the here and now and to satisfy what President Radhakrishnan calls ‘the basic human hunger for the unseen’. It is not a good qualification for the writing and reading of novels.”

— V.S. Naipaul

198. “In 1962, in spite of five-year plans and universal suffrage, and talk of socialism and the common man, I found that for most Indians Indian poverty was still a poetic concept, a prompting to piety and sweet melancholy, part of the country’s uniqueness, its Gandhian non-materialism.”

— V.S. Naipaul

199. “No civilization was so little equipped to cope with the outside world; no country was so easily raided and plundered, and learned so little from its disasters.”

— V.S. Naipaul