212 Quotes by V.S. Naipaul

It is important not to trust people too much.

The man from Beirut came in and watched. He stood beside Hans. Then he stood beside the furniture-maker and whispered to him in English, their secret language. ‘The guy’s locked himself in the cabin.

Small things can start us off in new ways of thinking, and I was started off by the postage stamps of our area.

Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.

I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world.

Everywhere else men are in movement, the world is in movement, and the past can only cause pain.

Africa is not a fun place, you know. A fun place is somewhere that lifts the spirits, that cossets the senses. I don’t think that can be said of the Africa I traveled in.

I would say to her, in that mixed river language we used, ‘One day, Beth, somebody will snatch your case. It isn’t safe to travel about with money like that.’ ‘The day that happens, Mis’ Salim, I will know the time has come to stay home.’ It was a strange way of thinking. But she was a strange woman.

I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.