V. S. Naipaul Quotes

1932–2018 United Kingdom

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul (17 August 1932 - 11 August 2018) was a British writer of Indo-Nepalese descent born and raised in Trinidad. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001.

United Kingdom
Academics
Nobel laureates
Novelists

Also known as: Naipaul, Naipaul, V. S., Naipaul, V.S., V.S. Naipaul

Random V. S. Naipaul quote

25 quotes

A writer is in the end not his books, but his myth. And that myth is in the keeping of others.

Steinbeck in Monterey (1970)

What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good.

Reading and Writing : A Personal Account (2000)

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.

The time before Islam is a time of blackness: that is part of Muslim theology. History has to serve theology.”

Among the Believers (1981)

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

That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing.

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

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there.

The Enigma of Arrival (1987)

To the convert his land is of no religious or historical importance; its relics are of no account; only the sands of Arabia are sacred.

Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (1998)

The universal civilization has been a long time in the making. It wasn't always universal; it wasn't always as attractive as it is today.

Our Universal Civilization (1990)

This idea of the pursuit of happiness is at the heart of the attractiveness of the civilization to so many outside it or on its periphery.

Our Universal Civilization (1990)

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.

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

In a Free State (1971)

It turns out now that the Arabs were the most successful imperialists of all time; since to be conquered by them (and then to be like them) is still, in the minds of the faithful, to be saved.

Why I Am Not a Muslim (1995)

I could scarcely bear to look at her eyes. They promised such intimacies.

Before comfort had been squeezed out of the hard land, like blood out of stone.

The family feuds or the village feuds often had to do with an idea of honor. Perhaps it was a peasant idea; perhaps this idea of honor is especially important to a society without recourse to law or without confidence in law.

A Turn in the South (1989)

The key Hindu concept of dharma — the right way, the sanctioned way, which all men must follow, according to their natures — is an elastic concept. At its noblest it combines self-fulfillment and truth to the self with the ideas of action as duty, action as its own spiritual reward, man as a holy vessel.

India: A Wounded Civilization (1977)

Nehru was unique in recent world history: a colonial protest figure, a folk hero who did not appeal to fanaticism but was a reasonable, reasoning man. A man committed to science, religious tolerance, the rule of law and the rights of man.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: V. S. Naipaul (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.