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
It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling.
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
The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
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
How could people like these, without words to put to their emotions and passions, manage? They could, at best, only suffer dumbly. Their pains and humiliations would work themselves out in their characters alone: like evil spirits possessing a body, so that the body itself might appear innocent of what it did.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid people and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and common.
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
In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
All cultures have been mingled forever.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
It is important not to trust people too much.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
Nothing was made in Trinidad.
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
I'm my own writer. My material means I'm entirely separate.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
Writing has to support itself.
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
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 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
In Trinidad, where as new arrivals we were a disadvantaged community, that excluding idea was a kind of protection it enabled us - for the time being, and only for the time being - to live in our own way and according to our own rules, to live in our own fading India.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
The world is what it is men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
V. S. Naipaul