V. S. Naipaul Zitate – Sprüche auf Englisch mit Übersetzung

Zitat des Tages von 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.

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

As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.

V. S. Naipaul

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.

V. S. Naipaul

It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut.

V. S. Naipaul

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

V. S. Naipaul

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

V. S. Naipaul

Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.

V. S. Naipaul

My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh.

V. S. Naipaul

I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.

V. S. Naipaul

But everything of value about me is in my books.

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

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

V. S. Naipaul

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

V. S. Naipaul

I'm thought to be a tough writer, but I'm really a softie.

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

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

V. S. Naipaul

The world is always in movement.

V. S. Naipaul

We made no inquiries about India or about the families people had left behind. When our ways of thinking had changed, and we wished to know, it was too late. I know nothing of the people on my father's side; I know only that some of them came from Nepal.

V. S. Naipaul

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

V. S. Naipaul

What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material. And the fictional form was going to force you to do things with the material, to dramatize it in a certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to explore the world, the other world, the world that one didn't know fully.

V. S. Naipaul

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

V. S. Naipaul

How can you be an atheist and have an ideology to go with it? To be an atheist is to be free of some areas of belief. I don't see how that can become an ideology.

V. S. Naipaul

In Trinidad, where as new arrivals we were a disadvantaged community, that excluding idea was a kind of protection; it enabled us - for the time being, and only for the time being - to live in our own way and according to our own rules, to live in our own fading India.

V. S. Naipaul

Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.

V. S. Naipaul

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

V. S. Naipaul

The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.

V. S. Naipaul

Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand.

V. S. Naipaul

I really wasn't equipped to be a writer when I left Oxford. But then I set out to learn. I've always had the highest regard for the craft. I've always felt it was work.

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

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

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

V. S. Naipaul

It's very attractive to people to be a victim. Instead of having to think out the whole situation, about history and your group and what you are doing... if you begin from the point of view of being a victim, you've got it half-made. I mean intellectually.

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

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.

V. S. Naipaul

The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.

V. S. Naipaul

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

V. S. Naipaul