Quotes from V.S. Naipaul

You couldn't listen to sweet songs about injustice unless you expected justice and received it much of the time. You couldn't sing songs about the end of the world unless-like the other people in that room, so beautiful with such simple things: African mats on the floor and African hangings on the wall and spears and masks-you felt that the world was going on and you were safe in it. How easy it was, in that room, to make those assumptions!

Actually, we owe a great deal to those British officers and men and scholars who went deep into our literature, to translate the texts which the brahmins didn't want known outside their own coterie.

And how are you, Ferdinand? You don't have to ask. You mustn't think it's bad just for you. It's bad for everybody. That's the terrible thing. It's bad for Prosper, bad for the man they gave your shop to, bad for everybody. Nobody's going anywhere.

You would say that he felt that money had made him holy.

Well, India is a country of nonsense. M. K. Gandhi

It isn't easy to turn you 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.

When we had come no one could tell me. We were not that kind of people. We simply lived; we did what was expected of us, what we had seen the previous generation do. We never asked why; we never recorded. We felt in our bones that we were a very old people; but we seemed to have no means of gauging the passing of time. Neither my father nor my grandfatehr could put dates to their stories. Not because they had forgotten or were confused; the past was simply the past.

I find that the most difficult thing in prose narrative is linking one thing with the other. The link might just be a sentence, or even a word. It sums up what has gone before and prepares one for what is to come.

When we had come no one could tell me. We were not that kind of people. We simply lived; we did what was expected of us, what we had seen the previous generation do. We never asked why; we never recorded. We felt in our bones that we were a very old people; but we seemed to have no means of gauging the passing of time. Neither my father nor my grandfather could put dates to their stories. Not because they had forgotten or were confused; the past was simply the past.

In the days of Muslim glory Islam opened itself to the learning of the world. Now fundamentalism provides an intellectual thermostat, set low. It equalizes, comforts, shelters and preserves.

India is for me a difficult country. It isn't my home and cannot be my home; and yet I cannot reject it or be indifferent to it; I cannot travel only for the sights. I am at once too close and too far.

I had to do the books I did because there were no books about those subjects to give me what I wanted. I had to clear up my world, elucidate it, for myself.

He was appalled by the cheaper hotels. In New York you drop fast.

Boy, the only thing to make is the thing without a name.

The poem written, his selfconsciousness violated, he was whole again.

In the city as nowhere else we are reminded that we are individuals, units. Yet the idea of the city remains; it is the god of the city we pursue, in vain.

The news about Eddoes and the shoes travelled round the street pretty quickly. My mother was annoyed. She said, 'You see what sort of thing life is. Here I is, working my finger to the bone. Nobody flinging me a pair of shoes just like that, you know. And there you got that thin-arse little man, doing next to nothing, and look at all the things he does get.

Where jargon turns living issues into abstractions, and where jargon ends by competing with jargon, people don't have causes. They only have enemies; only the enemies are real.

And, partly to have peace on Sundays, and partly because the combination of the word "Sunday" with the word "school" suggested denial and a spoiling of pleasure, he sent Anand and Savi to Sunday school.

It was unclean to clean; it was unclean even to notice. It was the business of the sweepers to remove excrement, and until the sweepers came, people were content to live in the midst of their own excrement.

Misir's first story was about a man who had been out of work for months and was starving. His five children were starving; his wife was having another baby. It was December and the shops were full of food and toys. On Christmas eve the man got a job. Going home that evening, he was knocked down and killed by a motorcar that didn't stop. 'Helluva thing, Mr Biswas said. 'I like the part about the car not stopping.

It was what he had taught her, what she had picked up from him and incorporated, as words, as passing attitude, into the chaos of words and attitudes she possessed: words that she might shed at any time as easily as she had picked them up, and forget she had ever spoken them, she who had once been married to a young politician and had without effort incarnated an ordinary correctness, and who might easily return to such a role.

I know the sort of doctors it have in Trinidad,' my mother used to say. 'They think nothing of killing two three people before breakfast.' This wasn't as bad as it sounds: in Trinidad the midday meal is called breakfast.

Untouched by imagination or intellect, great actions become mere activity; it