Quote

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

V. S. Naipaul

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

V. S. Naipaul
Died: 2018
Died: August 11
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
V.S. Naipaul
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
Writing
Always
Hysteria
Writes
Deepest
Comedy
Moment
Moments

More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

Image
It isn't that there's no right and wrong here. There's no right.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
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.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
I wish my prose to be transparent—I don't want the reader to stumble over me I want him to look through what I'm saying to what I'm describing. I don't want him ever to say, Oh, goodness, how nicely written this is. That would be a failure.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
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.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
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
Image
I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
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.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
Making a book is such a big enterprise.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
I've been a free man.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
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.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
Look, boys, it ever strike you that the world not real at all? It ever strike you that we have the only mind in the world and you just thinking up everything else? Like me here, having the only mind in the world, and thinking up you people here, thinking up the war and all the houses and the ships and them in the harbour. That ever cross your mind?
V. S. Naipaul
Image
I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
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.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
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.
V. S. Naipaul