Quotes from V.S. Naipaul

What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And -- though played out forms can throw up miraculous sports like The Importance of Being Earnest or Decline and Fall-- what is good is always what is new, in both form and content. What is good forgets whatever models it might have had, and is unexpected; we have to catch it on the wing. ((p. 62, Reading & Writing)

How terrible it would have been, at this time, to be without it; to have died among the Tulsis, amid the squalour of that large, disintegrating and indifferent family; to have left Shama and the children among them, in one room; or worse, to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one's portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated.

It was as Nazruddin had said, when I asked him about visas and he had said that bank notes were better. 'You can always get into those places. What is hard is to get out. That is a private fight. Everybody has to find his own way.

It isn't easy to turn your back on the past. It isn't something you can decide to do just like that. It is something you have to arm yourself for, or grief will ambush and destroy you.

doing many more things until it seemed that ritual had replaced grief.

paradise seemed further away than India, but Hell had become a bit closer

Some lesser husbands built a latrine on the hillside.

To awaken to history was to cease to live instinctively. It was to begin to see oneself and one's group the way the outside world saw one; and it was to know a kind of rage. India was now full of this rage. There had been a general awakening. But everyone awakened first to his own group or community; every group thought itself unique in its awakening; and every group sought to separate its rage from the rage of other groups.

Change had come over him without his knowing. There had been no precise point at which the city had lost its romance and promise, no point at which he had begun to consider himself old, his career closed, and his visions of the future became only visions of Anand's future. Each realization had been delayed and had come, not as a surprise, but as a statement of a condition long accepted.

On the front cover of Newsweek reviews A House for Mr. Biswas as a marvelous prose epic that matches the best 19th century novels for richness of comic insight and final, tragic power.

But this is madness. I am going in the wrong direction. There can't be a new life at the end of this.

A departure can feel like a desertion, a judgement on the place and people left behind.

To go back home was to play with impressions in this way, the way I played with the first pair of glasses I had, looking at a world now sharp and small and not quite real, now standard in size and real but blurred.

It made smuggling easy; but I was nervous of getting involved, because a government that breaks its own laws can also easily break you.

and it was extraordinary to me that some of the newspapers could have found good words for the butchery on the coast. But people are like that bout places in which they aren't really interested and where thy don't have to live.

With our cynicism, created by years of insecurity, how did we look on men? We judged the salesmen in the van der Weyden by the companies they represented, their ability to offer us concessions. Knowing such men, having access to the services they offered, and being flattered by them that we were not ordinary customers paying the full price or having to take our place in the queue, we thought we had mastered the world.

That was the best time. The last day, the day of leaving. It was a good journey. It became different at the other end.

Neither my father nor grandfather could put dates to their stories. Not because they had forgotten or were confused; the past was simply the past.

We are never finished with grief. It is part of the fabric of living. It is always waiting to happen. Love makes memories and life precious; the grief that comes to us is proportionate to that love and is inescapable.

If you get too attached to your roots in the old sense, you might actually become unrooted, fossilized. At least in form, at least in style, you must get into the new stream, get the new roots. More of India is doing that. Style becomes substance in one generation. Things that one starts to do because other people are doing it – like wearing long pants, in my father's case – become natural for the next generation.

And so my satisfactions had only been brothel satisfactions, which hadn't been satisfactions at all.

They say that men should look at the mother of the girl they intend to marry, Yvette said. Girls who did what I did should consider the wife a man has discarded or worn out, and know thye are not going to do much better.

We had become what the world outside had made us; we had to live in the world as it existed.

My wish for an adventure with Yvette was a wish to be taken up to the skies, to be removed from the life I had – the dullness, the pointless tension, 'the situation of the country'. It wasn't a wish to be involved with people as trapped as myself.