20 Quotes by V. Naipaul
- This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true.
- What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.
- 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 know, it was too late. I know nothing of the people on my father's side; I know only that some of them came from Nepal.
- In Trinidad, where as new arrivals we were a disadvantaged community, that excluding idea was a kind of protection; it enabled us - for the time being, and only for the time being - to live in our own way and according to our own rules, to live in our own fading India.
- The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.
- The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
- The world is always in movement.
- 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.
- The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.
- That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which is never an easy thing to do.
- One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
- It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut.
- I came to London. It had become the center of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost.
- 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 shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.
- I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
- Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.
- But everything of value about me is in my books.
- 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 world like that, not knowing who they are.
- I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
- I will say I am the sum of my books.
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