V. S. Naipaul
V. S. Naipaul
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, TC, is a Trinidadian Nobel Prize-winning British writer known for his comic early novels set in Trinidad and Tobago, his bleaker later novels of the wider world, and his autobiographical chronicles of life and travels. He has published more than 30 books, both of fiction and nonfiction, over some 50 years...
NationalityTrinidadian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth17 August 1932
england miles square
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.
alone sit weave
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.
london world lost
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.
husband night islands
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.
ideas political intuition
I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
attitude past
What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.
men two waiting
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.
lying ideas europe
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.
army winning men
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.
people gold done
The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves.
ideas community fading
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.
darkness world kind
The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.
taken civilization dying
A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
people speak authority
I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people.