People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement. V. S. Naipaul More Quotes by V. S. Naipaul More Quotes From V. S. Naipaul I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea. V. S. Naipaul intuition political ideas 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. V. S. Naipaul husband islands night 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 rise to twenty. When it drops to two he waits for it to get back to ten. V. S. Naipaul waiting men two 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. V. S. Naipaul europe lying ideas You need someone to see what you've done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what's gone into it. V. S. Naipaul appreciate gone needs In the beginning, before the arrival of the white men, I had considered myself neutral. I had wanted neither side to win, neither the army nor the rebels. As it turned out, both sides lost. V. S. Naipaul army winning men Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand. V. S. Naipaul needs I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading. V. S. Naipaul reading people thinking Some lesser husbands built a latrine on the hillside. V. S. Naipaul built husband 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 passion pain character What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude. V. S. Naipaul attitude past I've never abandoned the novel. V. S. Naipaul abandoned novel In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon. V. S. Naipaul curmudgeon reputation way A cat only has itself. V. S. Naipaul cat Nothing was made in Trinidad. V. S. Naipaul trinidad made Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society. V. S. Naipaul trinidad simple may What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material. And the fictional form was going to force you to do things with the material, to dramatize it in a certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to explore the world, the other world, the world that one didn't know fully. V. S. Naipaul you chance life world To be a writer you have to be out in the world, you have to risk yourself in the world, you have to be immersed in the world, you have to go out looking for it. This becomes harder as you get older because there's less energy, the days are shorter for older people and it's not so easy to go out and immerse oneself in the world outside. V. S. Naipaul yourself you people world The longer I live the more convinced I become that one of the greatest honors we can confer on other people is to see them as they are, to recognize not only that they exist, but that they exist in specific ways and have specific realities. V. S. Naipaul live more see people At school I had only admirers; I had no friends. V. S. Naipaul only no-friends friends school
