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. NAIPAULThe 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. NAIPAULAnd 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. NAIPAULBut everything of value about me is in my books.
V.S. NAIPAULI still think it’s really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.
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. NAIPAULWhen I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.
V.S. NAIPAULMaking a book is such a big enterprise.
V.S. NAIPAULLife 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. NAIPAULI 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 could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.
V.S. NAIPAULAll the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.
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. NAIPAULAfter all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
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. NAIPAULIt is important not to trust people too much.
V.S. NAIPAULI know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
V.S. NAIPAUL