V.S. Naipaul Quotes

118 quotes in 1247 categories

• 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…
• 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…
• Small things start us in new ways of thinking
• Life is a helluva thing. You can see trouble coming and you can't do a damn thing to prevent it coming. You just got to…
• And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of victory fills a…
• The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid people; and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid…
• It has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp…
• 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…
• But everything of value about me is in my books.
• Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
• What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And- though played out forms can throw up miraculous sports…
• We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
• We made no inquiries about India or about the families people had left behind. When our ways of thinking had changed, and we wished to…
• Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It…
• All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.
• The writer is all alone.
• It isn't that there's no right and wrong here. There's no right.
• How could people like these, without words to put to their emotions and passions, manage? They could, at best, only suffer dumbly. Their pains and…
• Some lesser husbands built a latrine on the hillside.
• I think when you see so many Hindu temples of the 10th century or earlier disfigured, defaced, you realise that something terrible happened. I feel…

Browse V.S. Naipaul Quotes by Category