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. NAIPAULEach book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
-
-
In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
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 -
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 -
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 -
We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
It is important not to trust people too much.
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 -
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 -
Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
My life is short. I can’t listen to banality.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
V.S. NAIPAUL