Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" At school I had only admirers; I had no friends. "
V. S. Naipaul
Had
Friends
School
Related Quotes:
" Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others. "
V. S. Naipaul
Feel
Career
Said
" I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time. "
V. S. Naipaul
Letting
You
Time
" If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead. "
V. S. Naipaul
Writer
Hostility
He
" Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe. "
V. S. Naipaul
House
Place
Child
" One is made by all the things around one. There are many things that have made one. For a writer to go around looking for things that have made him is asking for trouble. It's like giving a character to yourself. Can't do it. Can't do it. These things are just there. Is that enough? "
V. S. Naipaul
Yourself
Giving
Go
" I've never abandoned the novel. "
V. S. Naipaul
Abandoned
Novel
Never
" 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. "
V. S. Naipaul
Self
Expectations
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
Need
You
Appreciate
" Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand. "
V. S. Naipaul
Kicked
Thing
Only
" I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world. "
V. S. Naipaul
Place
World
Young
" I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs. "
V. S. Naipaul
Seeing
End
Eyes
" I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands. "
V. S. Naipaul
Come
Always
Who
" I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading. "
V. S. Naipaul
I Am
People
Kind
" Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society. "
V. S. Naipaul
Society
Simple
Complex
" I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading. "
V. S. Naipaul
People
Writer
Reading
" 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. "
V. S. Naipaul
Know
You
Think
" If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don't express your disregard for the essence of the culture. It's a form of aggression. "
V. S. Naipaul
Country
You
Aggression
" Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background. "
V. S. Naipaul
Write
Always
Background
" 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
Children
Child
World
" If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing. "
V. S. Naipaul
Talk
Writing
Oppression
" There are certain things that are too painful for people to even write about sometimes, and there are certain things that are too hard to read about again. "
V. S. Naipaul
Write
Sometimes
People
" 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
Business
People
Some People
" This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true. "
V. S. Naipaul
Unusual
True
People
" When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day. "
V. S. Naipaul
Strength
Day
Me
" Making a book is such a big enterprise. "
V. S. Naipaul
Making
Enterprise
Big
" The writer is all alone. "
V. S. Naipaul
Alone
Writer
" The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing. "
V. S. Naipaul
World
Darkness
Kind
" 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
Write
You
Narrative
" I read many things. I read to fill in my knowledge of the world. "
V. S. Naipaul
Things
Many
World
" The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it. "
V. S. Naipaul
Place
Become
Men