Quote

I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.

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
Cannot
Blurred
Ancestry
Beyond
Father
Mother

More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

Image
If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
Making a book is such a big enterprise.
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
I've never abandoned the novel.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
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
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
Image
I became very interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
The world is what it is men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
But everything of value about me is in my books.
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
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 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
Image
The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
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
All cultures have been mingled forever.
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