Quote

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

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
Europe
Lying
Idea
History
Also
Ideas
Introduced
Feel
Coast
Feels
Gave

More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

Image
Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it's complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he's able to keep processing that as well.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
I'm my own writer. My material means I'm entirely separate.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
I think when you see so many Hindu temples of the 10th century or earlier disfigured, defaced, you realise that something terrible happened. I feel the civilisation of that closed world was mortally wounded by those invasions the old world is destroyed. That has to be understood. Ancient Hindu India was destroyed.
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
The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
Life is a helluva thing. You can see trouble coming and you can't do a damn thing to prevent it coming. You just got to sit and watch and wait.
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
Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
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
His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.
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
I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
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
If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don't express your disregard for the essence of the culture. It's a form of aggression.
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
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
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 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
I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
V. S. Naipaul