The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
V.S. NAIPAULThe world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
V.S. NAIPAULI have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
V.S. NAIPAULIt is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That’s where the mischief starts. That’s where everything starts unravelling.
V.S. NAIPAULYou 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. NAIPAULHis ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.
V.S. NAIPAULThe 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. NAIPAULThat 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. NAIPAULIt 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. NAIPAULLife doesn’t have a neat beginning and a tidy end; life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should be all there.
V.S. NAIPAULIt is important not to trust people too much.
V.S. NAIPAULI feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.
V.S. NAIPAULIt isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.
V.S. NAIPAULThe 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. NAIPAULI’m thought to be a tough writer, but I’m really a softie.
V.S. NAIPAULIf writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
V.S. NAIPAULHome is, I suppose just a child’s idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.
V.S. NAIPAUL