Quote

I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie.

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
Tough
Writer
Thought
Really

More quotes by V. S. Naipaul

Image
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
Image
Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
Writers should provoke disagreement.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
In England people are very proud of being very stupid.
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
I came to London. It had become the center of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.
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
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
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
After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand.
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
All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.
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
Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
It has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter'.
V. S. Naipaul
Image
Writing has to support itself.
V. S. Naipaul