212 Quotes by V.S. Naipaul

All landscapes eventually turn to land, the gold of the imagination to the lead of reality.

In a cell like mine you very quickly become aware of your body. You can grow to hate your body. And your body is all you have: this was the curious thought that kept floating up through my rage.

If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.

When the man was totting up the fare, all the de luxe supplements, he worked the sum out twenty times on the adding machine. The same sum, twenty times. Why? Did he think the machine was going to change its mind?

I’m my own writer. My material means I’m entirely separate.

Reality is always separate from the ideal; but in Trinidad this fantasy is a form of masochism and is infinitely more cheating than the fantasy which makes the poor delight in films about rich or makes the English singer use and American accent.

The biography of a writer – or even the autobiography – will always have this incompleteness.

I had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming – but he had no literary judgment.

I went to India and met some people who had been involved in this guerrilla business, middle-class people who were rather vain and foolish. There was no revolutionary grandeur to it. Nothing.