Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
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
Wanted
Army
Men
Neither
Rebels
Beginning
Arrival
Side
Arrivals
Sides
Neutral
Winning
Rebel
White
Considered
Lost
Turned
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
The world is always in movement.
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
Africa is not a fun place, you know. A fun place is somewhere that lifts the spirits, that cossets the senses. I don't think that can be said of the Africa I traveled in.
V. S. Naipaul
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
Writing has to support itself.
V. S. Naipaul
I've never abandoned the novel.
V. S. Naipaul
Where jargon turns living issues into abstractions, and where jargon ends by competing with jargon, people don't have causes. They only have enemies.
V. S. Naipaul
I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
V. S. Naipaul
A cat only has itself.
V. S. Naipaul
I'm my own writer. My material means I'm entirely separate.
V. S. Naipaul
Men need history it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart it is enough that there is something there.
V. S. Naipaul
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
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
My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.
V. S. Naipaul
It isn't that there's no right and wrong here. There's no right.
V. S. Naipaul
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
I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
V. S. Naipaul
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
I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
V. S. Naipaul
