V. S. Naipaul Quotes - Page 5

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

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

In our island myth this was the prescribed end of marriages like mine: the wife goes off with someone from the Cercle Sportif, outside whose gates at night the willingly betrayed husband waits in his motorcar. The circumstances were slightly.

If it was Europe that gave us on the coast some idea of our history, it was Europe, I feel, that also introduced us to the lie.

I really wasn't equipped to be a writer when I left Oxford. But then I set out to learn. I've always had the highest regard for the craft. I've always felt it was work.

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.

Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.

Look, boys, it ever strike you that the world not real at all? It ever strike you that we have the only mind in the world and you just thinking up everything else? Like me here, having the only mind in the world, and thinking up you people here, thinking up the war and all the houses and the ships and them in the harbour. That ever cross your mind?

As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.

I had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment.

Where jargon turns living issues into abstractions, and where jargon ends by competing with jargon, people don't have causes. They only have enemies.

My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh.

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.

Writing has to support itself.

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

Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.

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.