Quotes from V.S. Naipaul

All landscapes eventually turn to land, the gold of the imagination to the lead of reality

I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs. You refer to yourself in order to understand other people. That's the novelist's gift, isn't it?

We feel of the great world that it is simply there, something for the lucky ones among us to explore, and then only at the edges. It never occurs to us that we might make some contribution to it ourselves. And that is why we miss everything. When we land at a place like London airport we are concerned only not to appear foolish. It is more beautiful and more complex than anything we could have dreamed of, but we are concerned only to let people see that we can manage and are not overawed.

In what was happening now there was still that element of popular frenzy; but it was also clear that it was more organized, or that at least it had some deeper principle.

around, beyond the trees, were the buildings. There you really did have an idea of the city as something made by man, and not as something that had just grown by itself and was simply there.

I thought: How dare you lecture me about history and loyalty, you slave? We have paid bitterly for people like you. Who have you ever been loyal to, apart from yourself and your family and your caste?

I don't know why they still building houses, Mr Biswas said. Nobody don't want a house these days. They just want a coal barrel. One coal barrel for one person. Whenever a baby born just get another coal barrel. You wouldn't see any houses anywhere then. Just a yard with five or six coal barrels standing up in two or three rows.

But I thought: That is the sound of war. That sound of a steady, grinding machine made me think of guns; and then I thought of the crazed and half-starved village people against whom the guns were going to be used, people whose rags were already the colour of ashes. This was the anxiety of a moment of wakefulness; I fell asleep again. When

Out of every kind of nervousness I didn't move.

The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves.

In 1962, in spite of five-year plans and universal suffrage, and talk of socialism and the common man, I found that for most Indians Indian poverty was still a poetic concept, a prompting to piety and sweet melancholy, part of the country's uniqueness, its Gandhian non-materialism.

They were a hospitable couple and they made a point (I feel for religious reasons) of offering hospitality to frightened or stranded foreigners.

There may be some part of the world – dead countries, or secure and by-passed ones – where men can cherish the past and think of passing on furniture and china to their heirs. Men can do that perhaps in Sweden or Canada.

She said, on another day, I do think about the individuals involved, all of them and I sometimes wonder what they really felt at certain moments, I think all of them were very courageous people. Each of them displayed some kind of courage in making the changes that they did make.

We have no means of understanding a fraction of the thought and science and philosophy and law that have gone to make that outside world. We simply accept it. We have grown up paying tribute to it, and that is all the most of us can do. We feel of the great world that it is simply there, something for the lucky ones to explore, and then only at the edges. It never occurs to us that we might make some contribution to it ourselves. And that is why we miss everything.

Confronted with her, I shed old fantasies. My body obeyed its new impulses, discovered in itself resources that answered my new need.

I forgot my fear. In this way fear, the feeling that everything could at any moment go, became background, a condition of life, something you had to accept.

Cruelty, yes: it was in the nature of Indian family life. The clan that gave protection and identity, and saved people from the void, was itself a little state, and it could be a hard place, full of politics, full of hatreds and changing alliances and moral denunciations. It was the kind of family life I had known for much of my childhood:...

Perhaps he had made Africa his subject because he had come to Africa and because he was a scholar, used to working with papers, and had found this place full of new papers.

He was, after all, like other high officials. I wondered why I thought he would be different. These men, who depended on the President's favour for everything, were bundles of nerves. The great power they excercised went with a constant fear of being destroyed.

The wines are Saccone and Speed,' he had said. It was a merchant's observation. He had meant that even there, in the centre of Africa, the wine had come from the shippers on our east coast, and not from the people on the other side. But in my imagination I allowed the words to stand for pure bliss.

to be among the ruins was to have your time-sense unsettled.

Everywhere else men are in movement, the world is in movement, and the past can only cause pain.

We exchanged greetings, and in the African way we could make that take time.