Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul (1932-2018)
V. S. Naipaul was a Trinidad and Tobago-born British writer of works of fiction and nonfiction in English. (V. S. Naipaul Quotes)
“A businessman is someone who buys at ten and is happy to get out at twelve. The other kind of man buys at ten, sees it rise to eighteen and does nothing. He is waiting for it to get to twenty. The beauty of numbers. When it drops to ten again he waits for it to get back to eighteen. When it drops to two he waits for it to get back to ten. Well, it gets back there. But he has wasted a quarter of his life. And all he’s got out of his money is a little mathematical excitement.”
V. S. Naipaul
A Bend in the River
“A departure can feel like a desertion, a judgment on the place and people left behind.”
V. S. Naipaul
A Bend in the River
“A small woman came with a child on her hip. She was pregnant again. And then I saw that she was herself hardly more than a child, twelve or thirteen, but excited at the idea of already being adult enough to experience important needs. Everyone was acting (though the man with the djinn, after his flash of vanity, seemed a little too far away); everyone knew his role. But was it acting when the whole world, or the world you knew, was in the play?”
V. S. Naipaul
Among the Believers
“A stranger could drive through Miguel Street and just say “Sum!” because he could see no more. But we who lived there saw our street as a world, where everybody was quite different from everybody else. Mam-man was mad; George was stupid; Big Foot was a bully; hat was an adventurer; Popo was a philosopher; and Morgan was our comedian.”
V. S. Naipaul
Miguel Street
“Actually, we owe a great deal to those British officers and men and scholars who went deep into our literature, to translate the texts which the brahmins didn’t want known outside their own coterie.” India Quotes: A Million Mutinies Now
“After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.”
V. S. Naipaul
A Bend in the River
“All landscapes eventually turn to land, the gold of the imagination to the lead of reality.”
V. S. Naipaul
The Mimic Men
“Anybody can be decisive during a panic; it takes a strong man to act during a boom.”
V. S. Naipaul
A Bend in the River
“Attributed the decay of Hindu society in Trinidad to the rise of the timorous, weak, non-beating class of husband.”
V. S. Naipaul
A House for Mr. Biswas
“Because of industrialization, and the green revolution in the rural areas, a new class of nouveau-riche persons are emerging, and these people are being exposed for the first time to university education, comfortable urban life, stylish living, and western influences – materialistic comforts. During this transition period, we are slowly cutting from the moral ethos of our grandfathers, and at the same time we don’t have the westerner’s idea of discipline and social justice. At the moment things are chaotic here.”
V. S. Naipaul
The Indian Trilogy
“Boy, the only thing to make is the thing without a name.”
V. S. Naipaul
Miguel Street
“But this is madness. I am going in the wrong direction. There can’t be a new life at the end of this.”
V. S. Naipaul
A Bend in the River
“Certain ideas overwhelm us by their simplicity.”
V. S. Naipaul
The Mimic Men
“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.”
V. S. Naipaul
A House for Mr. Biswas
“Cruelty, yes: it was in the nature of Indian family life. The clan that gave protection and identity, and saved people from the void, was itself a little state, and it could be a hard place, full of politics, full of hatreds and changing alliances and moral denunciations. It was the kind of family life I had known for much of my childhood…” India Quotes: A Million Mutinies Now
“Doing many more things until it seemed that ritual had replaced grief.”
V. S. Naipaul
The Mystic Masseur
“Everywhere else men are in movement, the world is in movement, and the past can only cause pain.”
V. S. Naipaul
A Bend in the River
“He asked me about myself and my travels. I told him I had been to Iran. He said, ‘Khomeini is a good man. He is Islamic.’ ‘Why do you say that?’ I had expected him, so orthodox and fierce, to disapprove of Khomeini’s Shia Islam as a deviation. He said, ‘He has banned women from appearing on television.’ It was all that he knew of Iran since the revolution.” (V. S. Naipaul Quotes)
V. S. Naipaul
Among the Believers
“He read political books. They gave him phrases which he could only speak to himself and use on Shama. They also revealed one region after another of misery and injustice and left him feeling more helpless and more isolated than ever. Then it was that he discovered the solace of Dickens. Without difficulty he transferred characters and settings to people and places he knew. In the grotesques of Dickens everything he feared and suffered from was ridiculed and diminished, so that his own anger, his own contempt became unnecessary, and he was given strength to bear the most difficult part of his day: dressing in the morning, that daily affirmation of faith in oneself, which at times for him was almost like an act of sacrifice.”
V. S. Naipaul
A House for Mr. Biswas
“He spoke about Africa in an unusual way. He spoke of Africa as though Africa was a sick child and he was the parent.”
V. S. Naipaul
A Bend in the River
“He was unrelenting in his cause, though his own need for religious faith involved him in contradictions and compromises; though the caste structures in his own family remained in place; and though, in the garbage of Madras, the broken roads, the absence of municipal regulation, the factionalism and plunder of the DMK administration and its successor administrations, something close to chaos could be seen.” India Quotes: A Million Mutinies Now
“His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.”
V. S. Naipaul
Half a Life
“How could people like these, without words to put to their emotions and passions, manage? They could, at best, only suffer dumbly. Their pains and humiliations would work themselves out in their characters alone: like evil spirits possessing a body, so that the body itself might appear innocent of what it did.”
V. S. Naipaul
The Enigma of Arrival
“How ridiculous were the attentions the weak paid one another in the shadow of the strong!”
V. S. Naipaul
A House for Mr. Biswas
“How terrible it would have been, at this time, to be without it; to have died among the Tulsis, amid the squalor of that large, disintegrating and indifferent family; to have left Shama and the children among them, in one room; or worse, to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one’s portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated.”
V. S. Naipaul
A House for Mr. Biswas
“I forgot my fear. In this way fear, the feeling that everything could at any moment go, became background, a condition of life, something you had to accept.”
V. S. Naipaul
A Bend in the River
“I had seen how deep in nearly every West Indian, high and low, were the prejudices of race; how often these prejudices were rooted in self-contempt; and how much important action they prompted. Everyone spoke of nation and nationalism but no one was willing to surrender the priviledges or even the separateness of his group.”
V. S. Naipaul
The Middle Passage
“If you get too attached to your roots in the old sense, you might actually become unrooted, fossilized. At least in form, at least in style, you must get into the new stream, get the new roots. More of India is doing that. Style becomes substance in one generation. Things that one starts to do because other people are doing it – like wearing long pants, in my father’s case – become natural for the next generation.” India Quotes: A Million Mutinies Now
“In 1962, in spite of five-year plans and universal suffrage, and talk of socialism and the common man, I found that for most Indians Indian poverty was still a poetic concept, a prompting to piety and sweet melancholy, part of the country’s uniqueness, its Gandhian non-materialism.” India Quotes: A Million Mutinies Now
“In fact, the only person who seemed to examine the event with some astonishment was myself, who marvelled that such a turn in my life could occur so easily.”
V. S. Naipaul
A Bend in the River
“In my late thirties the dream of disappointment and exhaustion had been the dream of the exploding head: the dream of a noise in my head so loud and long that I felt with the brain that survived that the brain could not survive; that this was death. Now, in my early fifties, after my illness, after I had left the manor cottage and put an end to that section of my life, I began to be awakened by thoughts of death, the end of things; and sometimes not even by thoughts so specific, not even by fear rational or fantastic, but by a great melancholy. This melancholy penetrated my mind while I slept; and then, when I awakened in response to its prompting, I was so poisoned by it, made so much not a doer (as men must be, every day of their lives), that it took the best part of the day to shake it off. And that wasted or dark day added to the gloom preparing for the night.”
V. S. Naipaul
The Enigma of Arrival
“In the city as nowhere else we are reminded that we are individuals, units. Yet the idea of the city remains; it is the god of the city we pursue, in vain.”
V. S. Naipaul
The Mimic Men
“In the days of Muslim glory Islam opened itself to the learning of the world. Now fundamentalism provides an intellectual thermostat, set low. It equalizes, comforts, shelters and preserves.”
V. S. Naipaul
Among the Believers
“Independence was worked for by people more or less at the top; the freedom it brought has worked its way down. People everywhere have ideas now of who they are and what they owe themselves. The process quickened with the economic development that came after independence; what was hidden in 1962, or not easy to see, what perhaps was only in a state of becoming, has become clearer. The liberation of spirit that has come to India could not come as release alone. In India, with its layer below layer of distress and cruelty, it had to come as disturbance. It had to come as rage and revolt. India was now a country of a million little mutinies.” India Quotes: A Million Mutinies Now
“India is old, and India continues. But all the disciplines and skills that India now seeks to exercise are borrowed. Even the ideas Indians have of the achievements of their civilization are essentially the ideas given them by European scholars in the nineteenth century. India by itself could not have rediscovered or assessed its past. Its past was too much with it, was still being lived out in the ritual, the laws, the magic – the complex instinctive life that muffles response and buries even the idea of inquiry.” (V. S. Naipaul Quotes)
V. S. Naipaul
India: A Wounded Civilization
“It is the first time I am in a church and I don’t like it. It is as though they are making me eat beef and pork. The flowers and the brass and the old smell and the body on the cross make me think of the dead. The funny taste is in my mouth, my old nausea, and I feel I would vomit if I swallow.”
V. S. Naipaul
In a Free State
“It is well that Indians are unable to look at their country directly, for the distress they would see would drive them mad. And it is well that they have no sense of history, for how then would they be able to continue to squat amid their ruins, and which Indian would be able to read the history of his country for the last thousand years without anger and pain? It is better to retreat into fantasy and fatalism, to trust to the stars in which the fortunes of all are written”
V. S. Naipaul
An Area of Darkness
“It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That’s where the mischief starts. That’s where everything starts unraveling…”
V. S. Naipaul
Magic Seeds
“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.”
V. S. Naipaul
A Bend in the River
“It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.”
V. S. Naipaul
A Bend in the River
“It made smuggling easy; but I was nervous of getting involved, because a government that breaks its own laws can also easily break you.”
V. S. Naipaul
A Bend in the River
“It was as Nazruddin had said, when I asked him about visas and he had said that bank notes were better. ‘You can always get into those places. What is hard is to get out. That is a private fight. Everybody has to find his own way.”
V. S. Naipaul
A Bend in the River
“It was what he had taught her, what she had picked up from him and incorporated, as words, as passing attitude, into the chaos of words and attitudes she possessed: words that she might shed at any time as easily as she had picked them up, and forget she had ever spoken them, she who had once been married to a young politician and had without effort incarnated an ordinary correctness, and who might easily return to such a role.”
V. S. Naipaul
Guerrillas
“Like many isolated people, they were wrapped up in themselves and not too interested in the world outside.”
V. S. Naipaul
A Bend in the River
“Look, boys, it ever strike you that the world not real at all? It ever strike you that we have the only mind in the world and you just thinking up everything else? Like me here, having the only mind in the world, and thinking up you people here, thinking up the war and all the houses and the ships and them in the harbor. That ever cross your mind?”
V. S. Naipaul
Miguel Street
“Me black and beautiful’ was the first thing she taught me. Then she pointed to the policeman with the gun outside and taught me”
V. S. Naipaul
In a Free State
“More than England to the British West Indian or even Holland to the Surinamer, France is the mother country to the Martiniquan.”
V. S. Naipaul
The Middle Passage
“My wish for an adventure with Yvette was a wish to be taken up to the skies, to be removed from the life I had – the dullness, the pointless tension, ‘the situation of the country’. It wasn’t a wish to be involved with people as trapped as myself.”
V. S. Naipaul
A Bend in the River
“Narayan’s novels did not prepare me for the distress of India. As a writer he had succeeded almost too well. His comedies were of the sort that requires a restricted social setting with well-defined rules; and he was so direct, his touch so light, that, though he wrote in English of Indian manners, he had succeeded in making those exotic manners quite ordinary. I did not lose my admiration for Narayan; but I felt that his comedy and irony were not quite what they had appeared to be, were part of a Hindu response to the world, a response I could no longer share. Narayan’s novels are less the purely social comedies I had once taken them to be than religious books, at times religious fables, and intensely Hindu.”
V. S. Naipaul
India: A Wounded Civilization
“Neither my father nor grandfather could put dates to their stories. Not because they had forgotten or were confused; the past was simply the past.”
V. S. Naipaul
A Bend in the River
“No religion is more worldly than Islam. In spite of its political incapacity, no religion keeps men’s eyes more fixed on the way the world is run. And in the poetry of the doctor’s son, in his fumbling response to the universal civilization, his concern with ‘basics’, I thought I could see how Islamic fervour could become creative, revolutionary, and take men on to a humanism beyond religious doctrine: a true renaissance, open to the new and enriched by it, as the Muslims in their early days of glory had been.”
V. S. Naipaul
Among the Believers
“Non-fiction can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies.”
V. S. Naipaul
A Bend in the River
“On the front cover of Newsweek reviews “A House for Mr. Biswas” as “a marvelous prose epic that matches the best 19th century novels for richness of comic insight and final, tragic power.”
V. S. Naipaul
A House for Mr. Biswas
“Out of all its squalor and human decay, its eruptions of butchery, India produced so many people of grace and beauty, ruled by elaborate courtesy. Producing too much life, it denied the value of life; yet it permitted a unique human development to so many. Nowhere were people so heightened, rounded and individualistic; nowhere did they offer themselves so fully and with such assurance. To know Indians was to take a delight in people as people; every encounter was an adventure. I did not want India to sink; the mere thought was painful.”
V. S. Naipaul
An Area of Darkness
“Rama rajya, Rama’s rule or kingdom – it was the highest Hindu praise: Rama the hero of one of the two great Hindu epics, the embodiment of goodness, universally loved, the man who in any situation could be relied upon to do the right thing, the religious thing, the wise thing, a figure at once human and divine: to be ruled by Rama’s law was to know bliss.”
V. S. Naipaul
The Indian Trilogy
“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.”
V. S. Naipaul
The Middle Passage
“She was without memory: Roche had decided that some time ago. She was without consistency or even coherence. She knew only what she was and what she had been born to; to this knowledge she was tethered; it was her stability, enabling her to adventure in security. Adventuring, she was indifferent, perhaps blind, to the contradiction between what she said and what she was so secure of being; and this indifference or blindness, this absence of the sense of the absurd, was part of her unavailability.” (V. S. Naipaul Quotes)
V. S. Naipaul
Guerrillas
“Small things start us in new ways of thinking”
V. S. Naipaul
A Bend in the River
“Some lesser husbands built a latrine on the hillside.”
V. S. Naipaul
A House for Mr. Biswas
“That was the best time. The last day, the day of leaving. It was a good journey. It became different at the other end.”
V. S. Naipaul
A Bend in the River
“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.”
V. S. Naipaul
In a Free State
“The medieval mind, which saw only continuity, seemed so unassailable. It existed in a world which, with all its ups and downs, remained harmoniously ordered and could be taken for granted. It had not developed a sense of history, which is a sense of loss; it had developed no true sense of beauty, which is a gift of assessment. While it was enclosed, this made it secure. Exposed, its world became a fairyland, exceedingly fragile. It was one step from the Kashmiri devotional songs to the commercial jingles of Radio Ceylon; it was one step from the roses of Kashmir to a potful of plasticdaisies.”
V. S. Naipaul
An Area of Darkness
“The news about Eddoes and the shoes travelled round the street pretty quickly. My mother was annoyed. She said, ‘You see what sort of thing life is. Here I is, working my finger to the bone. Nobody flinging me a pair of shoes just like that, you know. And there you got that thin-arse little man, doing next to nothing and look at all the things he does get.”
V. S. Naipaul
Miguel Street
“The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.”
V. S. Naipaul
In a free State
“The tragedy of power like mine is that there is no way down. There can only be extinction. Dust to dust; rags to rags; fear to fear.”
V. S. Naipaul
The Mimic Men
“The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”
V. S. Naipaul
A Bend in the River
“Their primary idea was the old Bengali idea of the Motherland, the idea that Bengal had given to the rest of India, Debu said: the idea that India had to be a country one could be proud of. The idea had decayed in Bengal since independence, Debu said. ‘In my class the idea is still there, but it is a remnant of the past – considered an anachronism – and in the class above, the industrialists and businessmen, the idea exists more or less as a negative quantity.” India Quotes: A Million Mutinies Now
“They say that men should look at the mother of the girl they intend to marry,” Yvette said. “Girls who did what I did should consider the wife a man has discarded or worn out, and know they are not going to do much better.”
V. S. Naipaul
A Bend in the River
“Though it was a comfort on occasion to play with the idea that outside this place a whole life waited for me, all the relationships that bind a man to the earth and give him a feeling of having a place.”
V. S. Naipaul
A Bend in the River
“Though no one recognized his strength, Anand was among the strong. His satirical sense kept him aloof. At first this was only a pose, and imitation of his father. But satire led to contempt, and at Shorthills contempt, quick, deep, inclusive, became part of his nature. It led to inadequacies, to self-awareness and a lasting loneliness. But it made him unassailable.”
V. S. Naipaul
A House for Mr. Biswas
“To awaken to history was to cease to live instinctively. It was to begin to see oneself and one’s group the way the outside world saw one; and it was to know a kind of rage. India was now full of this rage. There had been a general awakening. But everyone awakened first to his own group or community; every group thought itself unique in its awakening; and every group sought to separate its rage from the rage of other groups.” India Quotes: A Million Mutinies Now
“To be a devout Muslim was always to have distinctive things to do; it was to be guided constantly by rules; it was to live in a fever of the faith and always to be aware of the distinctiveness of the faith.”
V. S. Naipaul
Among the Believers
“To go back home was to play with impressions in this way, the way I played with the first pair of glasses I had, looking at a world now sharp and small and not quite real, now standard in size and real but blurred.”
V. S. Naipaul
A Way in the World
“Untouched by imagination or intellect, great actions become mere activity.”
V. S. Naipaul
The Loss of El Dorado
“We have nothing. We solace ourselves with the great men of our tribe, the Gandhi and the Nehru, and we castrate ourselves. ‘Here, take my manhood and invest it for me. Take my manhood and be a greater man yourself, for my sake!”
V. S. Naipaul
A Bend in the River
“Well, India is a country of nonsense. M. K. Gandhi”
V. S. Naipaul
An Area of Darkness
“What Raja Ram Mohun Roy began as a reform movment early in the 19th century Devendranath Tagore made into a religion. It transformed the Bengali middle class. Rabindranath Tagore expanded that religion into a culture. And that culture became Nehru’s politics.” India Quotes: A Million Mutinies Now
“When things went wrong they had the consolations of religion. This wasn’t just a readiness to accept Fate; this was a quiet and profound conviction about the vanity of all human Endeavors.” (V. S. Naipaul Quotes)
V. S. Naipaul
A Bend in the River
“Where jargon turns living issues into abstractions, and where jargon ends by competing with jargon, people don’t have causes. They only have enemies; only the enemies are real.”
V. S. Naipaul
The Writer and the World
“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.”
V. S. Naipaul
A Bend in the River
“Without always knowing what we were doing we were constantly adjusting to the arbitrariness by which we were surrounded.”
V. S. Naipaul
A Bend in the River
“Wouldn’t it have been better for Muslims to trust less to the saving faith and to sit down hard-headedly to work out institutions? Wasn’t that an essential part of the history of civilization, after all: the conversion of ethical ideals into institutions?”
V. S. Naipaul
Among the Believers
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