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Quotes by V. S. Naipaul

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
I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
– V. S. Naipaul
I came to London. It had become the center of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost.
– V. S. Naipaul
Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
– V. S. Naipaul
It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut.
– V. S. Naipaul
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
What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.
– V. S. Naipaul
Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.
– V. S. Naipaul
To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter.'
– V. S. Naipaul
The writer is all alone.
– V. S. Naipaul
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
Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it's complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he's able to keep processing that as well.
– V. S. Naipaul
One must always try to see the truth of a situation - it makes things universal.
– V. S. Naipaul
It's very attractive to people to be a victim. Instead of having to think out the whole situation, about history and your group and what you are doing... if you begin from the point of view of being a victim, you've got it half-made. I mean intellectually.
– V. S. Naipaul
It is important not to trust people too much.
– V. S. Naipaul
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
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
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
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
Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.
– V. S. Naipaul
Africa has no future.
– V. S. Naipaul