I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people’s lands.
V.S. NAIPAULI always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people’s lands.
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. NAIPAULMany writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
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. NAIPAULIt isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.
V.S. NAIPAULWriting has to support itself.
V.S. NAIPAULIt’s very attractive to people to be a victim. Instead of having to think out the whole situation, about history and your group and what you are doing. If you begin from the point of view of being a victim, you’ve got it half-made. I mean intellectually.
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. 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. NAIPAULThe world is always in movement.
V.S. NAIPAULJudgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
V.S. NAIPAULArgentine 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. NAIPAULThe world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.
V.S. NAIPAULI profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
V.S. NAIPAULIgnorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
V.S. NAIPAULThere 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