V. S. Naipaul

A cat only has itself.

— V. S. Naipaul

Africa has no future.

— V. S. Naipaul

The world is always in movement.

— V. S. Naipaul

Nothing was made in Trinidad.

— V. S. Naipaul

The writer is all alone.

— V. S. Naipaul

Writing has to support itself.

— V. S. Naipaul

I have a very small public.

— V. S. Naipaul

I've never abandoned the novel.

— V. S. Naipaul

But everything of value about me is in my books.

— V. S. Naipaul

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

— 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

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

The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.

— V. S. Naipaul

People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.

— V. S. Naipaul

All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.

— 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

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

— V. S. Naipaul

My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.

— V. S. Naipaul

You can't deny what you've learned; you can't deny your travels; you can't deny the nature of your life.

— 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

I went to India and met some people who had been involved in this guerrilla business, middle-class people who were rather vain…

— V. S. Naipaul

Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the…

— V. S. Naipaul

Argentine political life is like the life of an ant community or an African forest tribe: full of events, full of crisis…

— V. S. Naipaul

A businessman is someone who buys at ten and is happy to get out at twelve. The other kind of man buys…

— V. S. Naipaul

Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it's complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he's able…

— 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

The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at…

— 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

“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

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

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

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

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

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