212 Quotes by V.S. Naipaul

Me black and beautiful’ was the first thing she taught me. Then she pointed to the policeman with the gun outside and taught me: ‘He pig.

Making a book is such a big enterprise.

Life is a helluva thing. You can see trouble coming and you can’t do a damn thing to prevent it coming. You just got to sit and watch and wait.

I wondered that clothes, even the apparently revealing tropical clothes I had seen on Yvette, should have concealed so much, should have broken the body up, as it were, into separate parts and not really hinted at the splendour of the whole.

To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn’t know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.

I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.

And in India it was necessary to take people’s feelings into consideration.

After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.

If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.