V. S. Naipaul
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born in Chaguanas in August 1932, holding citizenship of both Trinidad and Tobago and the United Kingdom throughout his life. He wrote in English and worked across several forms, including the novel, the short story, the essay, travel writing, and journalism.
Naipaul was educated at Queen's Royal College and then at University College, Oxford. His notable works include A House for Mr Biswas, A Bend in the River, The Enigma of Arrival, and In a Free State. Over the course of his career he received a number of significant honors: the Booker Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, and a Knight Bachelor appointment. He was also elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2001 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Naipaul died in London on 11 August 2018.
Quotes by V. S. Naipaul
V. S. Naipaul's insights on:
We made no inquiries about India or about the families people had left behind. When our ways of thinking had changed, and we wished to know, it was too late. I know nothing of the people on my father's side; I know only that some of them came from Nepal.
Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.
Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will - with luck - come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise.
One isn't born one's self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people's ideas - and you have to work through it all.
Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
You can't deny what you've learned; you can't deny your travels; you can't deny the nature of your life.
