We made no inquiries about India or about the families people had left behind. When our ways of thinking had changed, and we wished to know, it was too late. I know nothing of the people on my father's side; I know only that some of them came from Nepal.
V. S. Naipaul

Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it's complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he's able to keep processing that as well.
V. S. Naipaul

All 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. Naipaul

The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.
V. S. Naipaul

Home 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

My life is short. I can't listen to banality.
V. S. Naipaul

The world is always in movement.
V. S. Naipaul

How can you be an atheist and have an ideology to go with it? To be an atheist is to be free of some areas of belief. I don't see how that can become an ideology.
V. S. Naipaul

The 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. Naipaul

It is important not to trust people too much.
V. S. Naipaul

It'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. Naipaul

I came to London. It had become the center of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost.
V. S. Naipaul

If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.
V. S. Naipaul

What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material. And the fictional form was going to force you to do things with the material, to dramatize it in a certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to explore the world, the other world, the world that one didn't know fully.
V. S. Naipaul

I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
V. S. Naipaul

A cat only has itself.
V. S. Naipaul

I read many things. I read to fill in my knowledge of the world.
V. S. Naipaul

I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
V. S. Naipaul

I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world.
V. S. Naipaul

An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
V. S. Naipaul

That 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. 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

I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
V. S. Naipaul

I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
V. S. Naipaul

One isn't born one's self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people's ideas - and you have to work through it all.
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

I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.
V. S. Naipaul

In England I am not English, in India I am not Indian. I am chained to the 1,000 square miles that is Trinidad; but I will evade that fate yet.
V. S. Naipaul

What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.
V. S. Naipaul

I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.
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

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

When 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. Naipaul

If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
V. S. Naipaul

In Trinidad, where as new arrivals we were a disadvantaged community, that excluding idea was a kind of protection; it enabled us - for the time being, and only for the time being - to live in our own way and according to our own rules, to live in our own fading India.
V. S. Naipaul

There are certain things that are too painful for people to even write about sometimes, and there are certain things that are too hard to read about again.
V. S. Naipaul

Africa is not a fun place, you know. A fun place is somewhere that lifts the spirits, that cossets the senses. I don't think that can be said of the Africa I traveled in.
V. S. Naipaul

I 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.
V. S. Naipaul

To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter.'
V. S. Naipaul

If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
V. S. Naipaul

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
V. S. Naipaul

You 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. Naipaul

I will say I am the sum of my books.
V. S. Naipaul

Africa has no future.
V. S. Naipaul

Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand.
V. S. Naipaul

Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.
V. S. Naipaul

Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.
V. S. Naipaul

A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
V. S. Naipaul

I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.
V. S. Naipaul

I've never abandoned the novel.
V. S. Naipaul

Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
V. S. Naipaul

The writer is all alone.
V. S. Naipaul