132 Quotes by V. S. Naipaul

How can you be an atheist and have an ideology to go with it? To be an atheist is to be free of some areas of belief. I don't see how that can become an ideology.

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.

I've never abandoned the novel.

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.

What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material. And the fictional form was going to force you to do things with the material, to dramatize it in a certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to explore the world, the other world, the world that one didn't know fully.

All cultures have been mingled forever.

I read many things. I read to fill in my knowledge of the world.

The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.

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