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
India
Trinidad
England
Evade
Fate
Chained
Square
Squares
Indian
Miles
English

More quotes by 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
Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
I have a very small public.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
The past has to be seen to be dead or the past will kill.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which is never an easy thing to do.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
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 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
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
In the beginning, before the arrival of the white men, I had considered myself neutral. I had wanted neither side to win, neither the army nor the rebels. As it turned out, both sides lost.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
The world outside existed in a kind of darkness and we inquired about nothing.
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
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
Making a book is such a big enterprise.
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