V. S. Naipaul
V. S. Naipaul
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, TC, is a Trinidadian Nobel Prize-winning British writer known for his comic early novels set in Trinidad and Tobago, his bleaker later novels of the wider world, and his autobiographical chronicles of life and travels. He has published more than 30 books, both of fiction and nonfiction, over some 50 years...
NationalityTrinidadian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth17 August 1932
writing two pieces
I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.
movement world
The world is always in movement.
lying facts deceit
An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
firsts film hours
To read a newspaper for the first time is like coming into a film that has been on for an hour. Newspapers are like serials. To understand them you have to take knowledge to them; the knowledge that serves best is the knowledge provided by the newspaper itself.
men sorrow victory
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
years year-end community
Argentine political life is like the life of an ant community or an African forest tribe: full of events, full of crisis and deaths, but life is always cyclical, and the year ends as it begins.
writing judging looks
That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which is never an easy thing to do.
sometimes stranger traits
We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
father becoming stories
All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.
husband night islands
In our island myth this was the prescribed end of marriages like mine: the wife goes off with someone from the Cercle Sportif, outside whose gates at night the willingly betrayed husband waits in his motorcar. The circumstances were slightly.
tough
I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie.
all-alone
The writer is all alone.
pain character passion
How could people like these, without words to put to their emotions and passions, manage? They could, at best, only suffer dumbly. Their pains and humiliations would work themselves out in their characters alone: like evil spirits possessing a body, so that the body itself might appear innocent of what it did.
husband built
Some lesser husbands built a latrine on the hillside.