Naipaul Quotes

“The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”
― V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River

“If a writer knows everything that is going to happen, then his book is dead before he begins it.”
― V.S. Naipaul

“Ah, sahib. I know you just come to comfort a old man left to live by hisself. Soomintra say I too old-fashion. And Leela, she always by you. Why you don’t sit down, sahib? It ain’t dirty. Is just how it does look.’
Ganesh didn’t sit down. ‘Ramlogan, I come to buy over your taxis.”
― V.S. Naipaul, The Mystic Masseur and Miguel Street

“If Mr. [V.S.] Naipaul takes no pleasure in the happy delineation of the varieties of human nature, then he must be intolerably stupid.”
― Roseanne Cash

“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 moran denunciations. It was the kind of family life I had known for much of my childhood: an early introduction to the ways of the world, and to the nature of cruelty. It had given me, as I suspected it had given Kala, a taste for the other kind of life, the solitary or less corwded life...”
― V.S Naipaul