Quote

If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.

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
Generate
Hostility
Writer
Dead
Doesn

More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

Image
The world outside existed in a kind of darkness and we inquired about nothing.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
An autobiography can distort facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
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
The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
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
In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
It isn't that there's no right and wrong here. There's no right.
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
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
All cultures have been mingled forever.
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
One must always try to see the truth of a situation - it makes things universal.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
I've been a free man.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
My life is short. I can't listen to banality.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
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.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
Some lesser husbands built a latrine on the hillside.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
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