V. S. Naipaul

Found 13 thoughts of V. S. Naipaul

Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.

I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

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.

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.

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

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.

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.

I will say I am the sum of my books.

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.

But everything of value about me is in my books.

What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.

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.