Writing has to support itself.
V.S. NAIPAULThe 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.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
-
-
I will say I am the sum of my books.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
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 -
I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
I’m my own writer. My material means I’m entirely separate.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
The first 50 years of the cinema were absolutely great years. Original minds were at work establishing the ways to tell a story. And what is happening now is a copying, a pastiche-ing of what was done by great men.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
You can’t deny what you’ve learned; you can’t deny your travels; you can’t deny the nature of your life.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
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 -
You need someone to see what you’ve done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what’s gone into it.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
Writers should provoke disagreement.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That’s where the mischief starts. That’s where everything starts unravelling.
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 -
One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
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 -
Life is a helluva thing. You can see trouble coming and you can’t do a damn thing to prevent it coming. You just got to sit and watch and wait.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
One must always try to see the truth of a situation – it makes things universal.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of victory fills a moment and then is over.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother’s house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
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 -
The family feuds or the village feuds often had to do with an idea of honor. Perhaps it was a peasant idea; perhaps this idea of honor is especially important to a society without recourse to law or without confidence in law.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
I’m thought to be a tough writer, but I’m really a softie.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
In England people are very proud of being very stupid.
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