Quotes by V. S. Naipaul

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

“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 itinerar...”

“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.”

“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 ...”

“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 th...”

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

“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 ...”

“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 B...”

“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 t...”

“The time before Islam is a time of blackness: that is part of Muslim theology. History has to serve theology.”

“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 foremos...”

“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.”

“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 o...”

“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 ...”

“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 ...”

“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, h...”

“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 centurie...”

“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 wor...”

“The Hindus, especially in Bengal, welcomed the New Learning of Europe and the institutions the British brought. The Muslims, wounded by their loss of power, and out of old religious scruples, stood...”