Quote

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

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
Like
Gold
People
Everybody
Else
Wanted
Done
Europeans
Good
Statues
Things
Slaves
Time
Slave

More quotes by 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
I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.
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
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
Image
People come and go all the time the world has always been in movement.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
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
Image
I will say I am the sum of my books.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.
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
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
Image
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
Image
It's very attractive to people to be a victim. Instead of having to think out the whole situation, about history and your group and what you are doing... if you begin from the point of view of being a victim, you've got it half-made. I mean intellectually.
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
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
Image
I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
I have a very small public.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
One must always try to see the truth of a situation - it makes things universal.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
I've never abandoned the novel.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
V. S. Naipaul