Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" 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
Thought
Roots
Questions
Related Quotes:
" Argentine political life is like the life of an ant community or an African forest tribe: full of events, full of crisis and deaths, but life is always cyclical, and the year ends as it begins. "
V. S. Naipaul
Year
Political
Life
" Nothing was made in Trinidad. "
V. S. Naipaul
Nothing
Made
" If a man begins writing at thirty, by the time he is fifty or sixty, the bulk of his work has been done. By the time he is eighty, he's got nothing more, you know? "
V. S. Naipaul
Work
Know
Time
" I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. "
V. S. Naipaul
Writing
Within
Two
" 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
" In England I am not English, in India I am not Indian. I am chained to the 1,000 square miles that is Trinidad; but I will evade that fate yet. "
V. S. Naipaul
Miles
Will
Fate
" In England people are very proud of being very stupid. "
V. S. Naipaul
Stupid
Proud
People
" 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
" 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
Men
Cinema
Done
" 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
Looking
Energy
People
" At school I had only admirers; I had no friends. "
V. S. Naipaul
Had
Friends
School
" I've been a free man. "
V. S. Naipaul
Been
Free Man
Free
" Great writing can be done in biography, history, art. "
V. S. Naipaul
Art
Done
Great
" That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which is never an easy thing to do. "
V. S. Naipaul
I Am
Judging
Look
" A cat only has itself. "
V. S. Naipaul
Cat
Only
Itself
" 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
Work
Learn
Craft
" The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next. "
V. S. Naipaul
Business
Writing
Turn
" 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
" Making a book is such a big enterprise. "
V. S. Naipaul
Making
Enterprise
Big
" My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world. "
V. S. Naipaul
Grief
Writing
Dirty
" If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris. "
V. S. Naipaul
You
Intellectual
Go
" 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
" 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 will say I am the sum of my books. "
V. S. Naipaul
Will
Am
Books
" 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
" 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'm very content. "
V. S. Naipaul
Content
Very
" There are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to. "
V. S. Naipaul
You
Talk
Name
" 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
See
More
Live
" I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie. "
V. S. Naipaul
Writer
Thought
Tough