V.S. Naipaul > Quotes

“The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.”
― V. S. Naipaul, In a Free State

“The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”
― V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River

“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.”
― V.S. Naipaul

“Non-fiction can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies.”
― V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River

“After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.”
― V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River

“It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling...”
― V.S. Naipaul, Magic Seeds

“His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.”
― V. S. Naipaul, Half a Life

“She had a great many opinions, but taken together they did not add up to a point of view.”
― V. S. Naipul

“He read political books. They gave him phrases which he could only speak to himself and use on Shama. They also revealed one region after another of misery and injustice and left him feeling more helpless and more isolated than ever. Then it was that he discovered the solace of Dickens. Without difficulty he transferred characters and settings to people and places he knew. In the grotesques of Dickens everything he feared and suffered from was ridiculed and diminished, so that his own anger, his own contempt became unnecessary, and he was given strength to bear the most difficult part of his day: dressing in the morning, that daily affirmation of faith in oneself, which at times for him was almost like an act of sacrifice.”
― V.S. Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas

“Like many isolated people, they were wrapped up in themselves and not too interested in the world outside.”
― V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River

“And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of victory fills a moment and then is over”
― V S Naipaul

“Going home at night! It wasn't often that I was on the river at night. I never liked it. I never felt in control. In the darkness of river and forest you could be sure only of what you could see — and even on a moonlight night you couldn't see much. When you made a noise — dipped a paddle in the water — you heard yourself as though you were another person. The river and the forest were like presences, and much more powerful than you. You felt unprotected, an intruder ... You felt the land taking you back to something that was familiar, something you had known at some time but had forgotten or ignored, but which was always there. You felt the land taking you back to what was there a hundred years ago, to what had been there always.”
― V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River

“It isn't that there's no right and wrong here. There's no right.”
― V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River

“government that breaks its own laws can also easily break you.”
― V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River

“Small things start us in new ways of thinking”
― V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River

“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?”
― V.S. Naipaul, Miguel Street

“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.”
― V.S. Naipaul

“Anybody can be decisive during a panic; it takes a strong man to act during a boom.”
― V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River

“Certain emotions bridge the years and link unlikely places.”
― Naipaul V.S.

“A stranger could drive through Miguel Street and just say “Sum!” because he could see no more. But we who lived there saw our street as a world, where everybody was quite different from everybody else. Mam-man was mad; George was stupid; Big Foot was a bully; hat was an adventurer; Popo was a philosopher; and Morgan was our comedian.”
― V.S. Naipaul, Miguel Street

“I often wonder what would have happened to me if I hadn't made that decision. I suppose I would have sunk. I suppose I would have found some kind of hole and tried to hide or pass. After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities. I would have hidden in my hole and been crippled by my sentimentality, doing what I was doing, and doing it well, but always looking for the wailing wall. And I would never have seen the world as the rich place that it is. You wouldn't have seen me here in Africa, doing what I do.”
― V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River

“How ridiculous were the attentions the weak paid one another in the shadow of the strong!”
― V.S. Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas

“A businessman is someone who buys at ten and is happy to get out at twelve. The other kind of man buys at ten, sees it rise to eighteen and does nothing. He is waiting for it to get to twenty. The beauty of numbers. When it drops to ten again he waits for it to get back to eighteen. When it drops to two he waits for it to get back to ten. Well, it gets back there. But he has wasted a quarter of his life. And all he's got out of his money is a little mathematical excitement.”
― V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River

“Out of its squalor and human decay, its eruptions of butchery, India produced so many people of grace and beauty, ruled by elaborate courtesy. Producing too much life, it denied the value of life; yet it permitted a unique human development to so many. Nowhere were people so heightened, rounded and individualistic; nowhere did they offer themselves so fully and with such assurance. To know Indians was to take a delight in people as people; every encounter was an adventure. I did not want India to sink [out of my memory]; the mere thought was painful.”
― V.S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness: A Discovery of India

“How could people like these, without words to put to their emotions and passions, manage? They could, at best, only suffer dumbly. Their pains and humiliations would work themselves out in their characters alone: like evil spirits possessing a body, so that the body itself might appear innocent of what it did.”
― V.S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival: A Novel in Five Sections

“I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.”
― V.S. Naipaul, The Doom Murders

“It is well that Indians are unable to look at their country directly, for the distress they would see would drive them mad. And it is well that they have no sense of history, for how then would they be able to continue to squat amid their ruins, and which Indian would be able to read the history of his country for the last thousand years without anger and pain? It is better to retreat into fantasy and fatalism, to trust to the stars in which the fortunes of all are written”
― V.S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness: His Discovery of India

“It was a light which gave solidity to everything and drew colour out from the heart of objects.”
― Naipaul V.S.

“In my late thirties the dream of disappointment and exhaustion had been the dream of the exploding head: the dream of a noise in my head so loud and long that I felt with the brain that survived that the brain could not survive; that this was death. Now, in my early fifties, after my illness, after I had left the manor cottage and put an end to that section of my life, I began to be awakened by thoughts of death, the end of things; and sometimes not even by thoughts so specific, not even by fear rational or fantastic, but by a great melancholy. This melancholy penetrated my mind while I slept; and then, when I awakened in response to its prompting, I was so poisoned by it, made so much not a doer (as men must be, every day of their lives), that it took the best part of the day to shake it off. And that wasted or dark day added to the gloom preparing for the night.”
― V.S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival: A Novel in Five Sections

“If a writer knows everything that is going to happen, then his book is dead before he begins it.”
― V.S. Naipaul