Quotes from V.S. Naipaul

I had talked of Raymond's pain when I was thinking of my own, and Yvette had talked of Raymond's needs when was thinking of her won. We had begun to talk, if not in opposites, at least indirectly, lying and not lying, making those signals at the truth which people in certain situations find it necessary to make.

It seemed as easy as that, if you came late to the world and found ready-made those things that other countries and peoples had taken so long to arrive at – writing, printing, universities, books, knowledge.

I felt his pain as an extra pressure on myself. I mentally added his pain to mine, made it part of my own.

That life was full of rules. Too many rules; it was a prepacked kind of life.

Whatever they say about going back to the beginning, they'll be interested in the car.

The weeks before he died, Mr Mohun Biswas, a journalist of Sikkim Street, St James , Port of Spain, was sacked. He had been ill for some time. In less than a year he had spent more than nine weeks at the Colonial Hospital and convalesced at home for even longer. When the doctor advised him to take a complete rest the 'Trinidad Sentinel' had no choice. It gave Mr Biswas three months' notice and continued, up to the time of his death, to supply him every morning with a free copy of the paper.

attributed the decay of Hindu society in Trinidad to the rise of the timorous, weak, non-beating class of husband.

To be a devout Muslim was always to have distinctive things to do; it was to be guided constantly by rules; it was to live in a fever of the faith and always to be aware of the distinctiveness of the faith.

On the white wall at the end of the room was a large oil painting of a European port, done in reds and yellows and blues. It was in slapdash modern style; the lady had painted it herself and signed it. She had given it pride of place in her main room. Yet she hadn't thought it worth the trouble of taking away.

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. I remember hearing from my grandfather that he had once shipped a boatful of slaves as a cargo of rubber. He couldn't tell me when he had done this. It was just there in his memory, floating around, without date or other association, as an unusual event in an uneventful life.

No civilization was so little equipped to cope with the outside world; no country was so easily raided and plundered, and learned so little from its disasters.

The tragedy of power like mine is that there is no way down. There can only be extinction. Dust to dust; rags to rags; fear to fear.

The novel is part of that Western concern with the condition of men, a response to the here and now. In India, thoughtful men have preferred to turn their backs on the here and now and to satisfy what President Radhakrishnan calls 'the basic human hunger for the unseen'. It is not a good qualification for the writing and reading of novels.

He was unrelenting in his cause, though his own need for religious faith involved him in contradictions and compromises; though the caste structures in his own family remained in place; and though, in the garbage of Madras, the broken roads, the absence of municipal regulation, the factionalism and plunder of the DMK administration and its successor administrations, something close to chaos could be seen.

Because they could assess themselves, the Europeans were better equipped to cope with changes than we were.

When the man was totting up the fare, all the de luxe supplements, he worked the sum out twenty times on the adding machine. The same sum, twenty times. Why? Did he think the machine was going to change its mind?

Reality is always separate from the ideal; but in Trinidad this fantasy is a form of masochism and is infinitely more cheating than the fantasy which makes the poor delight in films about rich or makes the English singer use and American accent.

It is the first time I am in a church and I don't like it. It is as though they are making me eat beef and pork. The flowers and the brass and the old smell and the body on the cross make me think of the dead. The funny taste is in my mouth, my old nausea, and I feel I would vomit if I swallow.

More than England to the British West Indian or even Holland to the Surinamer, France is the mother country to the Martiniquan.

I had seen how deep in nearly every West Indian, high and low, were the prejudices of race; how often these prejudices were rooted in self-contempt; and how much important action they prompted. Everyone spoke of nation and nationalism but no one was willing to surrender the priviledges or even the separateness of his group.

But at night, if you were on the river, it was another thing. You felt the land taking you back to something that was familiar, something you had known at some time but had forgotten or ignored, but which was always there. You felt the land taking you back to what was there a hundred years ago, to what had been there always.

The man from Beirut came in and watched. He stood beside Hans. Then he stood beside the furniture-maker and whispered to him in English, their secret language. 'The guy's locked himself in the cabin.

the President's white men, the promise of order and continuity; and it was oddly comforting, like the sound of rain in the night.

found, to his surprise, that he had put an end to their threats.