V.S. Naipaul Quotes

V.S. Naipaul presents thoughtful, literary reflections on writing and love that read like a quiet conversation.

39 quotes

1. I also bought a copy of The New York Times, the previous day's issue of which I had seen the previous day in Puerto Rico. I was interested in newspapers and knew this paper to be one of the foremost in the world. But to read a newspaper for the first time is like coming into a film that has been on for an hour. Newspapers are like serials. To understand them you have to take knowledge to them; the knowledge that serves best is the knowledge provided by the newspaper itself. It made me feel a stranger, that paper.

2. 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.

3. The frontier had ceased to exist. And the religions it had bred were beginning slowly to die. In the old days, when men, often of little education, had needed only to declare themselves ministers, people would have seen themselves reflected in the expounders of the Word. This quality of homespun would have made the religions appear creations of a community, personal and close and inviolable. Now a certain distance was needed.

4. 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.

5. I could scarcely bear to look at her eyes. They promised such intimacies.

6. I thought how terrible it would have been if, as could so easily have happened, I had died without knowing this depth of satisfaction, this other person that I had just discovered within myself. It was worth any price, any consequence.

7. And whenever I saw Luis, Graca's husband, I dealt with him with a friendship that was quite genuine, since it was offered out of gratitude for Graca's love.

8. Before comfort had been squeezed out of the hard land, like blood out of stone.

9. Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.

10. 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.

11. One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

12. 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.

13. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true. It might seem strange that a man who has dealt in words and emotions and ideas for nearly fifty years shouldn't have a few to spare, so to speak. But everything of value about me is in my books. 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 will - with luck - come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise. That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing.

14. I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

15. There are certain things that are too painful for people to even write about sometimes, and there are certain things that are too hard to read about again.

16. 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.

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

18. My life is short. I can't listen to banality.

19. If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don't express your disregard for the essence of the culture. It's a form of aggression.

20. I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people.

21. The world is always in movement.

22. At school I had only admirers; I had no friends.

23. In our island myth this was the prescribed end of marriages like mine: the wife goes off with someone from the Cercle Sportif, outside whose gates at night the willingly betrayed husband waits in his motorcar. The circumstances were slightly.

24. In the beginning, before the arrival of the white men, I had considered myself neutral. I had wanted neither side to win, neither the army nor the rebels. As it turned out, both sides lost.

25. I'm my own writer. My material means I'm entirely separate.

26. The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.

27. I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.

28. Where jargon turns living issues into abstractions, and where jargon ends by competing with jargon, people don't have causes. They only have enemies.

29. Africa is not a fun place, you know. A fun place is somewhere that lifts the spirits, that cossets the senses. I don't think that can be said of the Africa I traveled in.

30. I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world.

31. It is important not to trust people too much.

32. 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.

33. The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.

34. 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.

35. I had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment.

36. 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 remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.

37. The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

38. Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.

39. 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.