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. NAIPAULI 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.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
-
-
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 -
Making a book is such a big enterprise.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
Most 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. NAIPAUL -
It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
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 -
There 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. NAIPAUL -
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 -
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 -
To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn’t know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
V.S. NAIPAUL -
This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true.
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