Quotes from V. S. Naipaul

When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.

There are certain things that are too painful for people to even write about sometimes, and there are certain things that are too hard to read about again.

I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.

I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.

All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.

I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world.

The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.

I will say I am the sum of my books.

Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.

A cat only has itself.

I came to London. It had become the center of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost.

A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.

Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.

As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.

That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which is never an easy thing to do.

Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there.

I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.

You can't deny what you've learned; you can't deny your travels; you can't deny the nature of your life.

I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.

If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.

I'm very content.

The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.

There are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to.

The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.