Quote

In England I am not English, in India I am not Indian. I am chained to the 1,000 square miles that is Trinidad but I will evade that fate yet.

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
Fate
Chained
Square
Squares
Indian
Miles
English
India
Trinidad
England
Evade

More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

Image
Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.
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
One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
It's very attractive to people to be a victim. Instead of having to think out the whole situation, about history and your group and what you are doing... if you begin from the point of view of being a victim, you've got it half-made. I mean intellectually.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
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
Image
And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of victory fills a moment and then is over
V. S. Naipaul
Image
It isn't that there's no right and wrong here. There's no right.
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
I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
If it was Europe that gave us on the coast some idea of our history, it was Europe, I feel, that also introduced us to the lie.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
You need someone to see what you've done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what's gone into it.
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
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
I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
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
It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.
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
The past has to be seen to be dead or the past will kill.
V. S. Naipaul