Quotes by V.S. Naipaul

“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. ”

“I liked to feel I had to do things perfectly; I felt I was earning my freedom. Though I was in hiding, and though I worked every day until midnight, I felt I was much more in charge of myself than ...”

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

“And that luck was only fate's cheating, giving an illusion of power. But that illusion lingered, and I became restless. I decided to act, to challenge fate. (...) I gained courage; every afternoon ...”

“Small things start us in new ways of thinking”

“What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And -- though played out forms can throw up miraculous sports like The Importance of Being Earnest or Decline and Fal...”

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

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

“paradise seemed further away than India, but Hell had become a bit closer”

“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 ...”

“...Anand, look at the back of my hands. No hair. The sign of an advanced race, boy. And look at yours. No hair either. But you never know. With some of your mother's bad blood flowing in your veins...”

“How we flounder when emotion overtakes us.”

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

“I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs. You refer to yourself in order to understand other people. That's the novelist's gi...”

“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 ...”

“Certain emotions bridge the years and link unlikely places.”

“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.”

“The chaos lies all within.”

“For years and years, even during the time of my first visit in 1962, it has been said that Calcutta was dying, that its port was silting up, its antiquated industry declining, but Calcutta hadn't d...”

“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.”