Famous Quotes

Quotes by V S Naipaul

• Africa has no future.
• Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.
• Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.
• I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands.
• I went to India and met some people who had been involved in this guerrilla business, middle-class people who were rather vain and foolish. There was no revolutionary grandeur to it. Nothing.
• If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.
• It is important not to trust people too much.
• 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.
• One must always try to see the truth of a situation - it makes things universal.
• 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.
• 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.
• The writer is all alone.
• 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.'
• Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.
• What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.
• When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.