Quotes from V. S. Naipaul

One must always try to see the truth of a situation - it makes things universal.

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

Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it's complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he's able to keep processing that as well.

I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands.

I went to India and met some people who had been involved in this guerrilla business, middle-class people who were rather vain and foolish. There was no revolutionary grandeur to it. Nothing.

The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.

You need someone to see what you've done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what's gone into it.

It's very attractive to people to be a victim. Instead of having to think out the whole situation, about history and your group and what you are doing... if you begin from the point of view of being a victim, you've got it half-made. I mean intellectually.

And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of victory fills a moment and then is over

One is made by all the things around one. There are many things that have made one. For a writer to go around looking for things that have made him is asking for trouble. It's like giving a character to yourself. Can't do it. Can't do it. These things are just there. Is that enough?

I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people.

I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.

Making a book is such a big enterprise.