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

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

— V. S. Naipaul

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

— V. S. Naipaul

If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don't express your disregard for the essence…

— V. S. Naipaul

I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people.

— V. S. Naipaul

To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if…

— V. S. Naipaul

The world is always in movement.

— V. S. Naipaul

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

— V. S. Naipaul

I'm very content.

— V. S. Naipaul

In our island myth this was the prescribed end of marriages like mine: the wife goes off with someone from the Cercle…

— V. S. Naipaul

In the beginning, before the arrival of the white men, I had considered myself neutral. I had wanted neither side to win,…

— V. S. Naipaul

I'm my own writer. My material means I'm entirely separate.

— V. S. Naipaul

The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.

— 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

Where jargon turns living issues into abstractions, and where jargon ends by competing with jargon, people don't have causes. They only have…

— V. S. Naipaul

Africa is not a fun place, you know. A fun place is somewhere that lifts the spirits, that cossets the senses. I…

— 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

It is important not to trust people too much.

— V. S. Naipaul

This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I…

— V. S. Naipaul

The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.

— V. S. Naipaul

Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out…

— 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

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

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

— V. S. Naipaul

Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.

— V. S. Naipaul