V. S. Naipaul quotes - page 2

An autobiography can distort, facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies. It reveals the writer totally. (V. S. Naipaul)
It [Islam] has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter'... This abolition of the self demanded by Muslims was worse than the similar colonial abolition of identity. It is much, much worse in fact... You cannot just say you came out of nothing. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling... View quote
V. S. Naipaul
I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
It's very attractive to people to be a victim. Instead of having to think out the whole situation, about history and your group and what you are doing... if you begin from the point of view of being a victim, you've got it half-made. I mean intellectually. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
The writer is all alone. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
I really wasn't equipped to be a writer when I left Oxford. But then I set out to learn. I've always had the highest regard for the craft. I've always felt it was work. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
Making a book is such a big enterprise. (V. S. Naipaul)
There are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
The first 50 years of the cinema were absolutely great years. Original minds were at work establishing the ways to tell a story. And what is happening now is a copying, a pastiche-ing of what was done by great men. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
One must always try to see the truth of a situation - it makes things universal. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
The world is always in movement. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris. View quote
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 and deaths, but life is always cyclical, and the year ends as it begins. View quote
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 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. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
In England people are very proud of being very stupid. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
A cat only has itself. (V. S. Naipaul)
In England I am not English, in India I am not Indian. I am chained to the 1,000 square miles that is Trinidad; but I will evade that fate yet. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. View quote
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 questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery. View quote
V. S. Naipaul
The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing. View quote
V. S. Naipaul