Quote

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

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
Literature
Talk
Tutor
Friends
Charming
Really
Literary
Men
Student
Judgment
Students
Nice

More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

Image
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.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
It isn't that there's no right and wrong here. There's no right.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
Writing has to support itself.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
I think when you see so many Hindu temples of the 10th century or earlier disfigured, defaced, you realise that something terrible happened. I feel the civilisation of that closed world was mortally wounded by those invasions the old world is destroyed. That has to be understood. Ancient Hindu India was destroyed.
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
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.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
I will say I am the sum of my books.
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
Image
What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.
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
Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it's complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he's able to keep processing that as well.
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
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.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
You can't deny what you've learned you can't deny your travels you can't deny the nature of your life.
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