One isn't born one's self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people's ideas - and you have to work through it all. - V. S. Naipaul

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

My life is short. I can't listen to banality.
V. S. Naipaul

The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.
V. S. Naipaul

The world is always in movement.
V. S. Naipaul

How can you be an atheist and have an ideology to go with it? To be an atheist is to be free of some areas of belief. I don't see how that can become an ideology.
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

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

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

If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.
V. S. Naipaul

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.
V. S. Naipaul

What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material. And the fictional form was going to force you to do things with the material, to dramatize it in a certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to explore the world, the other world, the world that one didn't know fully.
V. S. Naipaul

I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
V. S. Naipaul

A cat only has itself.
V. S. Naipaul

I read many things. I read to fill in my knowledge of the world.
V. S. Naipaul

I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
V. S. Naipaul

I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world.
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

An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
V. S. Naipaul

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

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

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

I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.
V. S. Naipaul

One isn't born one's self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people's ideas - and you have to work through it all.
V. S. Naipaul

The first 50 years of the cinema were absolutely great years. Original minds were at work establishing the ways to tell a story. And what is happening now is a copying, a pastiche-ing of what was done by great men.
V. S. Naipaul

I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.
V. S. Naipaul