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
husband built
Some lesser husbands built a latrine on the hillside.
mother father ancestry
I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
deny
You can't deny what you've learned; you can't deny your travels; you can't deny the nature of your life.
class people india
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.
oil clothes america
Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
people movement world
People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.
mean individuality materials
I'm my own writer. My material means I'm entirely separate.
issues people enemy
Where jargon turns living issues into abstractions, and where jargon ends by competing with jargon, people don't have causes. They only have enemies.
heart men ideas
Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there.
life neat-and-tidy middle
Life doesn't have a neat beginning and a tidy end; life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should be all there.
writing wish would-be
I wish my prose to be transparent—I don't want the reader to stumble over me; I want him to look through what I'm saying to what I'm describing. I don't want him ever to say, Oh, goodness, how nicely written this is. That would be a failure.
law ideas honor
The family feuds or the village feuds often had to do with an idea of honor. Perhaps it was a peasant idea; perhaps this idea of honor is especially important to a society without recourse to law or without confidence in law.
book careers poetry
I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.
fun thinking spirit
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.