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
reading thinking people
I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
writing oppression ifs
If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
people important too-much
It is important not to trust people too much.
life-is-short life-is banality
My life is short. I can't listen to banality.
appreciate gone done
You need someone to see what you've done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what's gone into it.
nice men literature
I had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment.
writing ideas intuition
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.
islamic simple roots
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.
oxford crafts left
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.
children grandmother knowing
As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.
wall ideas decision
I often wonder what would have happened to me if I hadn't made that decision. I suppose I would have sunk. I suppose I would have found some kind of hole and tried to hide or pass. After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities. I would have hidden in my hole and been crippled by my sentimentality, doing what I was doing, and doing it well, but always looking for the wailing wall. And I would never have seen the world as the rich place that it is. You wouldn't have seen me here in Africa, doing what I do.
writing documentation details
All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.
two interesting people
Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
father becoming stories
All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.