V. S. Naipaul Quotes

The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.

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

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.

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.

After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.

Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.

The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid people; and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and common.

I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands.

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

The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.

Small things start us in new ways of thinking

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

Life is a helluva thing. You can see trouble coming and you can't do a damn thing to prevent it coming. You just got to sit and watch and wait.

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

His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.

Life doesn't have a neat beginning and a tidy end; life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should be all there.

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

Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.

I think when you see so many Hindu temples of the 10th century or earlier disfigured, defaced, you realise that something terrible happened. I feel the civilisation of that closed world was mortally wounded by those invasions the old world is destroyed. That has to be understood. Ancient Hindu India was destroyed.

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

People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.

It is important not to trust people too much.

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

The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves.

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.