Literary Occasions: Essays
A source page for quotes linked to V. S. Naipaul.
Related Quotes
“Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.”
Source: The Enigma of Arrival
“I'm my own writer. My material means I'm entirely separate.”
Source: Literary Occasions: Essays
Source: The Enigma of Arrival: A Novel in Five Sections
Source: Half a Life
Source: A Turn in the South
Source: Literary Occasions: Essays
“People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.”
“The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.”
Source: India: Picador Classic
Source: Literary Occasions: Essays
Source: An Area of Darkness: His Discovery of India
“One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.”
Source: The Writer and the World: Essays
“I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.”
“I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.”
“I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.”
“I will say I am the sum of my books.”
Source: Literary Occasions: Essays
“If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.”
Source: The Writer and the World: Essays
“Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand.”
“I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world.”
“If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.”
“The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.”
“The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.”
Source: Literary Occasions: Essays