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

- In a Free State, V.S. Naipaul

Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.

- V.S. Naipaul

The world is what it is men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

- A Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul

Non-fiction can distort facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies.

- A Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul

It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling...

- Magic Seeds, V.S. Naipaul

His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.

- Half a Life, V.S. Naipaul

After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.

- A Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul

Like many isolated people, they were wrapped up in themselves and not too interested in the world outside.

- A Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul

It isn't that there's no right and wrong here. There's no right.

- A Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul

And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of victory fills a moment and then is over

- V.S. Naipaul

Small things start us in new ways of thinking

- A Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul

Certain emotions bridge the years and link unlikely places.

- V.S. Naipaul

Life is a helluva thing. You can see trouble coming and you can't do a damn thing to prevent it coming. You just got to sit and watch and wait.

- V.S. Naipaul

Some lesser husbands built a latrine on the hillside.

- A House for Mr Biswas, V.S. Naipaul

Paradise seemed further away than India, but Hell had become a bit closer

- V.S. Naipaul

Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand. 

- V.S. Naipaul

A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying. 

- V.S. Naipaul

In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon. 

- V.S. Naipaul

It is important not to trust people too much. 

- V.S. Naipaul

It was in that garage that Alec worked, no longer wearing red bodices or peeing blue, but doing mysterious greasy things.

- 2 Novels: A House For Mr. Biswas, V.S. Naipaul

My life is short. I can't listen to banality. 

- V.S. Naipaul

In England I am not English, in India I am not Indian. I am chained to the 1,000 square miles that is Trinidad; but I will evade that fate yet. 

- V.S. Naipaul

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

- V.S. Naipaul

Anybody can be decisive during a panic it takes a strong man to act during a boom.

- A Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul

Doing many more things until it seemed that ritual had replaced grief.

- The Mystic Masseur, V.S. Naipaul

Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society. 

- V.S. Naipaul

A complying memory has obliterated many of them and edited my childhood down to a brief cinematic blur.

- V.S. Naipaul

You need someone to see what you've done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what's gone into it. 

- V.S. Naipaul

I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness. 

- V.S. Naipaul

Great writing can be done in biography, history, art. 

- V.S. Naipaul

I've never abandoned the novel. 

- V.S. Naipaul

Writers should provoke disagreement. 

- V.S. Naipaul

I will say I am the sum of my books. 

- V.S. Naipaul

Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background. 

- V.S. Naipaul

The writer is all alone. 

- V.S. Naipaul

Writing has to support itself.

- V.S. Naipaul

At school I had only admirers; I had no friends. 

- V.S. Naipaul

If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms, break the forms. 

- V.S. Naipaul

My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world. 

- V.S. Naipaul

The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate. 

- V.S. Naipaul

This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true. 

- V.S. Naipaul

I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands. 

- V.S. Naipaul

If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don't express your disregard for the essence of the culture. It's a form of aggression. 

- V.S. Naipaul

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. 

- V.S. Naipaul

I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading. 

- V.S. Naipaul

One must always try to see the truth of a situation - it makes things universal. 

- V.S. Naipaul

If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account. 

- V.S. Naipaul

I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea. 

- V.S. Naipaul

It was a light which gave solidity to everything and drew colour out from the heart of objects.

- V.S. Naipaul

Government that breaks its own laws can also easily break you.

- A Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul

[In]the too solid three-dimensional city, I could never feel myself as anything but spectral, disintegrating, pointless, fluid.

- V.S. Naipaul

More than England to the British West Indian or even Holland to the Surinamer, France is the mother country to the Martiniquan.

- The Middle Passage, V.S. Naipaul

But the people I found, the people I was attracted to were not unlike myself. They were trying to find order in their world, looking for the centre..

- V.S. Naipaul

An autobiography can distort, facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies. It reveals the writer totally.

- V.S. Naipaul

How we flounder when emotion overtakes us.

- V.S. Naipaul

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

- V.S. Naipaul

The world is always in movement.

- V.S. Naipaul

I came to London. It had become the center of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost. 

- 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

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria. 

- V.S. Naipaul

I read many things. I read to fill in my knowledge of the world. 

- V.S. Naipaul

I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world. 

- V.S. Naipaul

I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people. 

- V.S. Naipaul

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

- V.S. Naipaul

I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred. 

- V.S. Naipaul

I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs. 

- V.S. Naipaul

I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time. 

- V.S. Naipaul

I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. 

- V.S. Naipaul

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

- V.S. Naipaul

If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.

- V.S. Naipaul

When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day. 

- V.S. Naipaul