Quote

I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands.

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
Home
Come
Always
People
Lands
Land
Knew
Looking

More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

Image
I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
The world outside existed in a kind of darkness and we inquired about nothing.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
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
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 had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
The past has to be seen to be dead or the past will kill.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
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
The world is always in movement.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
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.
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
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.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
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 read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
It 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'.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
I went to India and met some people who had been involved in this guerrilla business, middle-class people who were rather vain and foolish. There was no revolutionary grandeur to it. Nothing.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
The writer is all alone.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
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
V. S. Naipaul