V. S. Naipaul quotes

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria. (V. S. Naipaul)
The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead. View quote
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 you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn't know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
One isn't born one's self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people's ideas - and you have to work through it all. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves. View quote
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; perhaps this idea of honor is especially important to a society without recourse to law or without confidence in law. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
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. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
I will say I am the sum of my books. (V. S. Naipaul)
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. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
My life is short. I can't listen to banality. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
Africa has no future. View quote
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 I was lost. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
But everything of value about me is in my books. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
I could scarcely bear to look at her eyes. They promised such intimacies. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
Life doesn't have a neat beginning and a tidy end, life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should be all there. (V. S. Naipaul)
Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
India is for me a difficult country. It isn't my home and cannot be my home; and yet I cannot reject it or be indifferent to it; I cannot travel only for the sights. I am at once too close and too far. View quote
V. S. Naipaul