Literary Occasions Quotes

“We are in fact dealing with the type of society which Camus described in the opening chapter of The Rebel: a society which has not learned to see and is incapable of assessing itself, which asks no questions because ritual and myth have provided all the answers, a society which has not learned “rebellion.”
― V.S. Naipaul, Literary Occasions: Essays

“The attitude might be interpreted as aristocratic; in no country is aristocracy as easy as in India. But we are in reality dealing with something more limiting and less comprehensible: the Indian habit of exclusion, denial, non-seeing”
― V.S. Naipaul, Literary Occasions: Essays

“He never asked what I had done with my life, or even what I was doing in Venezuela. Like many people who live in small or retarded communities, he had little curiosity. His own life was his only story.”
― V.S. Naipaul, Literary Occasions: Essays

“any attempt at narrative can give value to an experience which might otherwise evaporate away.”
― V.S. Naipaul, Literary Occasions: Essays

“If landscapes do not start to be real until they have been interpreted by an artist, so, until they have been written about, societies appear to be without shape and embarrassing”
― V.S. Naipaul, Literary Occasions: Essays

“the extraordinary distress of India, when acknowledged, was like something given, eternal, something to be read only as background. And there were, as always, those who thought they could find a special spiritual quality in the special Indian distress.”
― V.S. Naipaul, Literary Occasions: Essays