Quote

The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.

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
City
Cities
Every
Ancillary
Estate
Estates
Council
British
Aspect

More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

Image
Small things start us in new ways of thinking
V. S. Naipaul
Image
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
Image
I came to London. It had become the center of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
I've never abandoned the novel.
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
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 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 England people are very proud of being very stupid.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
The world outside existed in a kind of darkness and we inquired about nothing.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
I have a very small public.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
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
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
I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.
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
To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn't know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.
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