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. V. S. Naipaul More Quotes by V. S. Naipaul More Quotes From V. S. Naipaul Africa has no future. V. S. Naipaul 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. V. S. Naipaul indiaclasspeople Writers should provoke disagreement. V. S. Naipaul disagreementprovokingshould In Trinidad, where as new arrivals we were a disadvantaged community, that excluding idea was a kind of protection; it enabled us - for the time being, and only for the time being - to live in our own way and according to our own rules, to live in our own fading India. V. S. Naipaul indiacommunityideas I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world. V. S. Naipaul biggergrew-upworld 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 V. S. Naipaul fatherpeoplethinking If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris. V. S. Naipaul parisintellectualwish If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account. V. S. Naipaul narrativewritinglittles My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world. V. S. Naipaul griefbookdirty 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. V. S. Naipaul feminineeditorspublishers 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 life-iswaitingwatches The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness. V. S. Naipaul incompletenessautobiographybiographies Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background. V. S. Naipaul writingcharacterfiction I became very interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery. V. S. Naipaul islamicsimplediscovery 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 realboyswar 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 walldecisionideas 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. V. S. Naipaul regardcraftsoxford The first 50 years of the cinema were absolutely great years. Original minds were at work establishing the ways to tell a story. And what is happening now is a copying, a pastiche-ing of what was done by great men. V. S. Naipaul great-yearmenyears All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right. V. S. Naipaul dadstoriesfather Great writing can be done in biography, history, art. V. S. Naipaul donewritingart
