Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true.
V. S. Naipaul
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
V. S. Naipaul
Died: 2018
Died: August 11
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
V.S. Naipaul
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
Given
True
Readings
Give
Lecture
Giving
Lectures
People
Unusual
Told
Asks
Reading
More quotes by V. S. Naipaul
An autobiography can distort facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
V. S. Naipaul
There are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to.
V. S. Naipaul
Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.
V. S. Naipaul
If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.
V. S. Naipaul
I wish my prose to be transparentI 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
The writer is all alone.
V. S. Naipaul
Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
V. S. Naipaul
Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it it awaits the next book. It will - with luck - come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise
V. S. Naipaul
Argentine political life is like the life of an ant community or an African forest tribe: full of events, full of crisis and deaths, but life is always cyclical, and the year ends as it begins.
V. S. Naipaul
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
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
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
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
Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.
V. S. Naipaul
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
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
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
I'm my own writer. My material means I'm entirely separate.
V. S. Naipaul
Making a book is such a big enterprise.
V. S. Naipaul
My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.
V. S. Naipaul
