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V. S. Naipaul

36 quotes

“A writer is in the end not his books, but his myth. And that myth is in the keeping of others.”
V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Steinbeck in Monterey" (1970), in Daily Telegraph Magazine (3 April 1970), later published in The Overcrowded Barracoon, and other articles (1972)
“Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.”
V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) first seen 1989 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Wanderer of Endless Curiosity" by R. Z. Sheppard in Time magazine (10 July 1989)
“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.”
V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "V.S. Naipaul in Search of Himself: A Conversation" with Mel Gussow, The New York Times, (24 April 1994)
“One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.”
V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "V.S. Naipaul in Search of Himself: A Conversation" with Mel Gussow, The New York Times, (24 April 1994)
“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.”
V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "V.S. Naipaul in Search of Himself: A Conversation" with Mel Gussow, The New York Times, (24 April 1994)
“What is happening in India is a mighty creative process.... But every other Indian knows precisely what is happening. Deep down he knows that a larger response is emerging to their historical humiliation. … It is not enough to abuse these youths or use that fashionable word from Europe, 'fascism'… There is a big, historical development going on in India. Wise men should understand it and ensure that it does not remain in the hands of fanatics.”
V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in International Herald Tribune (8 May 1996); also quoted in The Saffron Swastika (2001) by K Elst, Ch 1
“What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And — though played out forms can throw up miraculous sports like The Importance of Being Earnest or Decline and Fall — what is good is always what is new, in both form and content. What is good forgets whatever models it might have had, and is unexpected; we have to catch it on the wing.”
V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) first seen 2000 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Reading and Writing : A Personal Account (2000), p. 62
“I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true. It might seem strange that a man who has dealt in words and emotions and ideas for nearly fifty years shouldn't have a few to spare, so to speak. But everything of value about me is in my books. 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. That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing.”
V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Two Worlds," Nobel lecture (7 December 2001)
“It [Islam] has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter'... This abolition of the self demanded by Muslims was worse than the similar colonial abolition of identity. It is much, much worse in fact... You cannot just say you came out of nothing.”
V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in VS Naipaul launches attack on Islam" in The Guardian (4 October 2001)
“If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.”
V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted from , "VS Naipaul: A controversial author who crafted his lines and insults", Indian Express (12 August 2018)
“I have to stress that I was traveling in the non-Arab Muslim world. Islam began as an Arab religion; it spread as an Arab empire. In Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia—the countries of my itinerary—I was traveling, therefore, among people who had been converted to what was an alien faith. I was traveling among people who had to make a double adjustment—an adjustment to the European empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and an earlier adjustment to the Arab faith. You might almost say that I was among people who had been doubly colonized, doubly removed from themselves.”
V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: V. S. Naipaul, New York Review of Books (January 31, 1991) quoted in Why I Am Not a Muslim (1995), Ibn Warraq
“It turns out now that the Arabs were the most successful imperialists of all time; since to be conquered by them (and then to be like them) is still, in the minds of the faithful, to be saved.”
V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: quoted in Why I Am Not a Muslim (1995), Ibn Warraq
“At the height of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, V.S. Naipaul saw it as ‘a new, historical awakening’, of ‘Indians becoming alive to their history’ and ‘beginning to understand that there has been a great vandalising of India. Because of the nature of the conquest and the nature of Hindu society such understanding had eluded Indians before’.”
V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Vikram Sampath - Waiting for Shiva_ Unearthing the Truth of Kashi's Gyan Vapi-BluOne Ink (2024)
“It is like reading of a land periodically devastated by hordes of lemmings or locusts; it is like turning from the history of a coral reef, in which every act and every death is a foundation, to the depressing chronicle of a succession of castles built on the waste sand of the sea-shore. This is Woodruff on the difference between European history and Indian history. He has chosen his images well. But the sandcastle is not quite exact. The sandcastle is flattened by the tide and leaves not trace, and India is above all the land of ruins.”
V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.”
V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“India is for me a difficult country. It isn’t my home and cannot be my home; and yet I cannot reject it or be indifferent to it; I cannot travel only for the sights. I am at once too close and too far.”
V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“While the Ottomans moved into South-East Europe, the Moghul invasion of India destroyed much of Hindu and Buddhist civilization there. The recent destruction by Moslems in Afghanistan of colossal Buddhist statues is a reminder of what happened to temples and shrines, on an enormous scale, when Islam took over.”
V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The key Hindu concept of dharma — the right way, the sanctioned way, which all men must follow, according to their natures — is an elastic concept. At its noblest it combines self-fulfillment and truth to the self with the ideas of action as duty, action as its own spiritual reward, man as a holy vessel.”
V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The time before Islam is a time of blackness: that is part of Muslim theology. History has to serve theology.”
V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I also bought a copy of The New York Times, the previous day's issue of which I had seen the previous day in Puerto Rico. I was interested in newspapers and knew this paper to be one of the foremost in the world. But to read a newspaper for the first time is like coming into a film that has been on for an hour. Newspapers are like serials. To understand them you have to take knowledge to them; the knowledge that serves best is the knowledge provided by the newspaper itself. It made me feel a stranger, that paper.”
V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there.”
V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The family feuds or the village feuds often had to do with an idea of honor. Perhaps it was a peasant idea; perhaps this idea of honor is especially important to a society without recourse to law or without confidence in law.”
V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Religion now had to have its compartment, almost its social place. The frontier had ceased to exist. And the religions it had bred were beginning slowly to die. In the old days, when men, often of little education, had needed only to declare themselves ministers, people would have seen themselves reflected in the expounders of the Word. This quality of homespun would have made the religions appear creations of a community, personal and close and inviolable. Now a certain distance was needed.”
V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“<!-- This commented out section seems to be a paraphrase not precisely located within "Beyond Belief" :”
V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To the convert his land is of no religious or historical importance; its relics are of no account; only the sands of Arabia are sacred.”
V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life doesn't have a neat beginning and a tidy end, life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should be all there.”
V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I could scarcely bear to look at her eyes. They promised such intimacies.”
V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I thought how terrible it would have been if, as could so easily have happened, I had died without knowing this depth of satisfaction, this other person that I had just discovered within myself. It was worth any price, any consequence.”
V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And whenever I saw Luis, Graça's husband, I dealt with him with a friendship that was quite genuine, since it was offered out of gratitude for Graça's love.”
V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Before comfort had been squeezed out of the hard land, like blood out of stone.”
V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“India has been very lucky in the Nehru family. Nehru was unique in recent world history: a colonial protest figure, a folk hero who did not appeal to fanaticism but was a reasonable, reasoning man. A man committed to science, religious tolerance, the rule of law and the rights of man. Indira Gandhi, his daughter, carried on this way of looking at things. In Britain, she might have had the reputation of being domineering, harsh, even ruthless. And you can easily make a case for her being authoritarian, antidemocratic, stamping out protest. But it isn't enough just to do that. One must consider what was on the other side. In 1975, some opposition parties wanted India to go back to some pre-industrial time of village life. Piety can take odd forms.”
V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: India After Indira Gandhi" in The Daily Mail, and The New York Times (3 November 1984)
“We knew nothing but despotism. That is why the very rich Mughal empire could break up into nothing. Turn to dust at the merest touch of a foreign power. There was no institution, there was no creative nation, no university, no printing press, there was nothing but personal power. … How do you ignore history? But the nationalist movement, independence movement ignored it. You read the Glimpses of World History by Jawaharlal Nehru, it talks about the mythical past and then it jumps the difficult period of the invasions and conquests. So you have Chinese pilgrims coming to Bihar, Nalanda and places like that. Then somehow they don't tell you what happens, why these places are in ruin. They never tell you why Elephanta island is in ruins or why Bhubaneswar was desecrated. So history has to be studied, it is very painful history. But it is not more painful than most countries have had. … It isn't India alone that has had a rough time, that has to be understood. But the rough time has to be faced and it cannot be glossed over. There are tools for us to understand the rough time. We can read a man like Ibn Battuta who will tell you what it was like to be there in the midst of the fourteenth century, terrible times. An apologist of the invaders would like to gloss that over. But it would be wrong to gloss that over, that has to be understood. … But I would like to see this past recovered and not dodged.”
V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: How do you ignore history?" Interview with Urmi Goswami (14 January 2003)
“I never formulated the idea of the universal civilization until 11 years ago, when I traveled for many months in a number of non-Arab Muslim countries — Iran, Indonesia, Malaysia and Pakistan — to try to understand what had driven them to their rage. That Muslim rage was just beginning to be apparent. I thought I would be traveling among people who would be like the people of my own community, the Trinidad Indian community. A large portion of Indians were Muslims; we both had a similar 19th century imperial or colonial history. But it wasn't like that. Despite the history we had in common, I had traveled a different way. Starting with the Hindu background of the instinctive, ritualized life; growing up in the unpromising conditions of colonial Trinidad; I had gone through many stages of knowledge and self-knowledge. I had been granted the ideas of inquiry and the tools of scholarship. I could carry four or five or six different cultural ideas in my head. Now, traveling among non-Arab Muslims, I found myself among a colonized people who had been stripped by their faith of all that expanding cultural and historical knowledge of the world that I had been growing into on the other side of the world.”
V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of Joseph Conrad's earliest stories of the East Indies, from the 1890's, was about a local raja or chieftain, a murderous man, a Muslim (though it is never explicitly said), who, in a crisis, having lost his magical counselor, swims out one night to one of the English merchant ships in the harbor to ask the sailors, representatives of the immense power that had come from the other end of the world, for an amulet, a magical charm. The sailors are at a loss; but then someone among them gives the raja a British coin, a sixpence commemorating Queen Victoria's Jubilee; and the raja is well pleased. Conrad didn't treat the story as a joke; he loaded it with philosophical implications for both sides, and I feel now that he saw truly. In the 100 years since that story, the wealth of the world has grown, power has grown, education has spread; the disturbance, the "philosophical shriek" of men at the margin (to use Conrad's words), has been amplified.”
V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The universal civilization has been a long time in the making. It wasn't always universal; it wasn't always as attractive as it is today. The expansion of Europe gave it for at least three centuries a racial taint, which still causes pain. In Trinidad I grew up in the last days of that kind of racialism. And that, perhaps, has given me a greater appreciation of the immense changes that have taken place since the end of the war, the extraordinary attempt to accommodate the rest of the world, and all the currents of that world's thought. Because my movement within this civilization has been from Trinidad to England, from the periphery to the center, I may have felt certain of its guiding principles more freshly than people to whom these things were everyday. One such realization — I suppose I have sensed it most of my life, but I have understood it philosophically only during the preparation of this talk — has been the beauty of the idea of the pursuit of happiness. Familiar words, easy to take for granted; easy to misconstrue. This idea of the pursuit of happiness is at the heart of the attractiveness of the civilization to so many outside it or on its periphery. I find it marvelous to contemplate to what an extent, after two centuries, and after the terrible history of the earlier part of this century, the idea has come to a kind of fruition. It is an elastic idea; it fits all men. It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. I don't imagine my father's Hindu parents would have been able to understand the idea. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist, and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.”
V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Islam is in its origins an Arab religion. Everyone not an Arab who is a Muslim is a convert. Islam is not simply a matter of conscience or private belief. It makes imperial demands. A convert’s worldview alters. His holy places are in Arab lands; his sacred language is Arabic. His idea of history alters. He rejects his own; he becomes, whether he likes it or not, a part of the Arab story. The convert has to turn away from everything that is his. The disturbance for societies is immense, and even after a thousand years can remain unresolved; the turning away has to be done again and again. People develop fantasies about who and what they are; and in the Islam of converted countries there is an element of neurosis and nihilism. These countries can be easily set on the boil.”
V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source