V. S. Naipaul Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

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

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

“I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.”

“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.”

“I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.”

“If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.”

“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.”

“What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.”

“I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.”

“When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.”