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. NAIPAULI 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. NAIPAULI have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
V.S. NAIPAULI will say I am the sum of my books.
V.S. NAIPAULOne must always try to see the truth of a situation – it makes things universal.
V.S. NAIPAULI’m thought to be a tough writer, but I’m really a softie.
V.S. NAIPAULI’m my own writer. My material means I’m entirely separate.
V.S. NAIPAULEverybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
V.S. NAIPAULThe writer is all alone.
V.S. NAIPAULPeople come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.
V.S. NAIPAULMost people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.
V.S. NAIPAULIgnorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
V.S. NAIPAULEach book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.
V.S. NAIPAULIt’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. NAIPAULThere are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to.
V.S. NAIPAULIn a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
V.S. NAIPAULThe 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