V. S. Naipaul Quotes & Sayings (Page 7)

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“There are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to.”

“Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will - with luck - come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise.”

“I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands.”

“Writers should provoke disagreement.”

“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.”

“I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.”

“You need someone to see what you've done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what's gone into it.”