Quote

Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand.

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
Understand
Need
Needs
Thing
Africans
Kicked

More quotes by 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
I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
But everything of value about me is in my books.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
Writing has to support itself.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.
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
The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
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
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
People come and go all the time the world has always been in movement.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.
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
I've been a free man.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.
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
The world outside existed in a kind of darkness and we inquired about nothing.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
Where jargon turns living issues into abstractions, and where jargon ends by competing with jargon, people don't have causes. They only have enemies.
V. S. Naipaul