V. S. Naipaul Quotes

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

The world is always in movement.

How we flounder when emotion overtakes us.

Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel s...

What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material...

Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it's complete. For another kind of wri...

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

Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for...

And that luck was only fate's cheating, giving an illusion of power. But that illusion lingered, and...

It is important not to trust people too much.

Small things start us in new ways of thinking

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

The tragedy of power like mine is that there is no way down. There can only be extinction. Dust to d...

It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where every...

To go back home was to play with impressions in this way, the way I played with the first pair of gl...

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

A businessman is someone who buys at ten and is happy to get out at twelve. The other kind of man bu...

paradise seemed further away than India, but Hell had become a bit closer

For years and years, even during the time of my first visit in 1962, it has been said that Calcutta ...

When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to...

It was a light which gave solidity to everything and drew colour out from the heart of objects.

What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And -- though played...

Certain emotions bridge the years and link unlikely places.

The chaos lies all within.

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

I liked to feel I had to do things perfectly; I felt I was earning my freedom. Though I was in hidin...

...Anand, look at the back of my hands. No hair. The sign of an advanced race, boy. And look at your...

A complying memory has obliterated many of them and edited my childhood down to a brief cinematic bl...