V. S. Naipaul Quotes

• I’m thought to be a tough writer, but I’m really a softie.

  V. S. Naipaul

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  Tags in Thought

• I’m the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

  V. S. Naipaul

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  Tags in People, Kind

• 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

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  Tags in Really, Always

• I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.

  V. S. Naipaul

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  Tags in People, Feel

• I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Topics in Mother

• I have a very small public.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Public, Small

• Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn’t fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will – with luck – come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Topics in Luck

  Tags in Hardly, During

• What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Topics in Attitude

  Tags in General

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Late, Too Late, Way

• 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

  Tags in Lectures

• The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.

  V. S. Naipaul

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  Tags in Outside, Existed, Darkness

• The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

  V. S. Naipaul

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  Tags in World, Men

• 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

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  Tags in Intuition, Gone

• The biography of a writer – or even the autobiography – will always have this incompleteness.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Tags in Autobiography, Incompleteness

• 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

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  Tags in Element, Easy

• One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Topics in Humor

  Tags in Comedy, Writers And Writing, Hysteria, Deepest, Write, Comedian

• 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

  Tags in Cut, Paths, Stretches, Narrowest

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Rules, Protection, India, Arrivals, Enabled, Excluding, Fading

• I will say I am the sum of my books.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Tags in Sum

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in World

V. S. Naipaul (88)

Birth:	17th August, 1932
Nationality:	British, Trinidadian
Profession:	Essayist, Novelist

About

Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad is a Trinidadian-British writer of Indo-Trinidadian heritage of Kanyakubja Brahmin known for his novels focusing on the legacy of the British Empire's colonialism. He has also written works of non-fiction, such as travel writing and essays.

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Today's Anniversary - 14th November

Births

• 1910 - Norman MacCaig
• 1951 - Zhang Yimou
• 1971 - Vikas Khanna
• 1906 - Louise Brooks
• 1904 - Michael Ramsey

Deaths

• 2001 - Percy Ross
• 2012 - Norodom Sihamoni
• 1991 - Tony Richardson
• 2008 - Kristin Hunter
• 2000 - Robert Trout