212 Quotes by V.S. Naipaul

I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

Nothing was made in Trinidad.

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

Change had come over him without his knowing. There had been no precise point at which the city had lost its romance and promise, no point at which he had begun to consider himself old, his career closed, and his visions of the future became only visions of Anand’s future. Each realization had been delayed and had come, not as a surprise, but as a statement of a condition long accepted.

It isn’t easy to turn your back on the past. It isn’t something you can decide to do just like that. It is something you have to arm yourself for, or grief will ambush and destroy you.

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

Without always knowing what we were doing we were constantly adjusting to the arbitrariness by which we were surrounded.

We heard of ambushes on roads we knew, of villages attacked, of headmen and officials killed. It was at this time that Mahesh said something which I remembered. It wasn’t the kind of thing I was expecting from him – so careful of his looks and clothes, so spoiled, so obsessed with his lovely wife. Mahesh said to me: “What do you do? You live here, and you ask that? You do what we all do. You carry on.

Whereas before he had waited for me to ask questions, now it was he who put up little ideas, little debating points, as though he wanted to get a discussion going.