V. S. Naipaul

What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.

— V. S. Naipaul

A writer is in the end not his books, but his myth. And that myth is in the keeping of others.

— V. S. Naipaul

Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.

— V. S. Naipaul

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

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

— V. S. Naipaul

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

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

If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.

— V. S. Naipaul

The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.

— V. S. Naipaul

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

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

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

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

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— V. S. Naipaul

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

I could scarcely bear to look at her eyes. They promised such intimacies.

— V. S. Naipaul

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

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

Before comfort had been squeezed out of the hard land, like blood out of stone.

— V. S. Naipaul

Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.

— V. S. Naipaul