V. S. Naipaul

Nothing was made in Trinidad.

— V. S. Naipaul

The world is always in movement.

— V. S. Naipaul

Africa has no future.

— V. S. Naipaul

A cat only has itself.

— V. S. Naipaul

I've been a free man.

— V. S. Naipaul

I'm very content.

— V. S. Naipaul

I have a very small public.

— V. S. Naipaul

I've never abandoned the novel.

— V. S. Naipaul

Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.

— V. S. Naipaul

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

— V. S. Naipaul

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

— V. S. Naipaul

My life is short. I can't listen to banality.

— V. S. Naipaul

At school I had only admirers; I had no friends.

— V. S. Naipaul

I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie.

— V. S. Naipaul

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

— V. S. Naipaul

But everything of value about me is in my books.

— V. S. Naipaul

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

— V. S. Naipaul

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

— V. S. Naipaul

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

— V. S. Naipaul

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

— V. S. Naipaul

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

— V. S. Naipaul

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

— V. S. Naipaul

I came to London. It had become the center of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And…

— V. S. Naipaul

I had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he…

— V. S. Naipaul

There are certain things that are too painful for people to even write about sometimes, and there are certain things that are…

— V. S. Naipaul

And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of…

— V. S. Naipaul

All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of…

— V. S. Naipaul

In Trinidad, where as new arrivals we were a disadvantaged community, that excluding idea was a kind of protection; it enabled us…

— V. S. Naipaul

I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start,…

— V. S. Naipaul

I became very interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple…

— V. S. Naipaul

The family feuds or the village feuds often had to do with an idea of honor. Perhaps it was a peasant idea;…

— V. S. Naipaul

Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the…

— V. S. Naipaul

What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And- though played out forms can throw…

— V. S. Naipaul

“It was only after I'd grown up and left that I developed an attitude [towards the South]. And at first my attitude…

— V. S. Naipaul

One is made by all the things around one. There are many things that have made one. For a writer to go…

— V. S. Naipaul

To be a writer you have to be out in the world, you have to risk yourself in the world, you have…

— V. S. Naipaul

“For the first time in his life he began to experience a kind of true pride. He felt himself, so to speak,…

— V. S. Naipaul

I think when you see so many Hindu temples of the 10th century or earlier disfigured, defaced, you realise that something terrible…

— V. S. Naipaul

It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart…

— V. S. Naipaul

What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material. And the fictional…

— V. S. Naipaul