Quotes from V.S. Naipaul

Wouldn't it have been better for Muslims to trust less to the saving faith and to sit down hard-headedly to work out institutions? Wasn't that an essential part of the history of civilization, after all: the conversion of ethical ideals into institutions?

He asked me about myself and my travels. I told him I had been to Iran. He said, 'Khomeini is a good man. He is Islamic.' 'Why do you say that?' I had expected him, so orthodox and fierce, to disapprove of Khomeini's Shia Islam as a deviation. He said, 'He has banned women from appearing on television.' It was all that he knew of Iran since the revolution.

We violate no body so much as our own: towards it we display the perversity of the cat that constantly rips its wounds open.

A small woman came with a child on her hip. She was pregnant again. And then I saw that she was herself hardly more than a child, twelve or thirteen, but excited at the idea of already being adult enough to experience important needs. Everyone was acting (though the man with the djinn, after his flash of vanity, seemed a little too far away); everyone knew his role. But was it acting when the whole world, or the world you knew, was in the play?

We should have known from the first day that the country wasn't for us, and we should have taken our courage in both hands and gone back home.

Unless we can get them thinking, and give them real ideas instead of just politics and principles, these young men will keep our world in turmoil for the next half century.

The world carried no witness to Mr Biswas's birth and early years.

Rama rajya, Rama's rule or kingdom – it was the highest Hindu praise: Rama the hero of one of the two great Hindu epics, the embodiment of goodness, universally loved, the man who in any situation could be relied upon to do the right thing, the religious thing, the wise thing, a figure at once human and divine: to be ruled by Rama's law was to know bliss.

Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.

Non-fiction can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies.

After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.

It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling...

Like many isolated people, they were wrapped up in themselves and not too interested in the world outside.

It isn't that there's no right and wrong here. There's no right.

Look, boys, it ever strike you that the world not real at all? It ever strike you that we have the only mind in the world and you just thinking up everything else? Like me here, having the only mind in the world, and thinking up you people here, thinking up the war and all the houses and the ships and them in the harbour. That ever cross your mind?

Small things start us in new ways of thinking

government that breaks its own laws can also easily break you.

Life is a helluva thing. You can see trouble coming and you can't do a damn thing to prevent it coming. You just got to sit and watch and wait.

Anybody can be decisive during a panic; it takes a strong man to act during a boom.

A stranger could drive through Miguel Street and just say "Sum!" because he could see no more. But we who lived there saw our street as a world, where everybody was quite different from everybody else. Mam-man was mad; George was stupid; Big Foot was a bully; hat was an adventurer; Popo was a philosopher; and Morgan was our comedian.

How ridiculous were the attentions the weak paid one another in the shadow of the strong!

A businessman is someone who buys at ten and is happy to get out at twelve. The other kind of man buys at ten, sees it rise to eighteen and does nothing. He is waiting for it to get to twenty. The beauty of numbers. When it drops to ten again he waits for it to get back to eighteen. When it drops to two he waits for it to get back to ten. Well, it gets back there. But he has wasted a quarter of his life. And all he's got out of his money is a little mathematical excitement.

How could people like these, without words to put to their emotions and passions, manage? They could, at best, only suffer dumbly. Their pains and humiliations would work themselves out in their characters alone: like evil spirits possessing a body, so that the body itself might appear innocent of what it did.

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.