"The World Is What It Is was a fitting title for the biography of a writer who struggled all his life between poles. On the one hand, there was social and personal anomie, on the other a commitment to vocation. He had a mutated Hindu view that all the world was illusion and only the self was real, and yet his writing showed him observing and reporting the external world with precision. He was a difficult man to get to know. His meaning for the island of his birth, and for the world after the centuries of empires and colonies, “everything of value”, as he put it in his Nobel lecture, was in his books: "I am the sum of my books." In time, that will be seen as his most appropriate epitaph."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Nobel laureates in LiteratureTravel writersEssayistsAcademics from the United KingdomNovelists from the United Kingdom
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
"VS Naipaul obituary" by Kenneth Ramchand, in The Guardian (12 August 2018)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/V._S._Naipaul
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
V. S. Naipaul
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul (17 August 1932 - 11 August 2018) was a British writer of Indo-Nepalese descent born and raised in Trinidad. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001.
45 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by V. S. Naipaul →
Related Quotes
"We knew nothing but despotism. That is why the very rich Mughal empire could break up into nothing. Turn to dust at t…"
"It turns out now that the Arabs were the most successful imperialists of all time; since to be conquered by them (and…"
"What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And — though played out forms can thr…"
"It [Islam] has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy y…"
"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 …"
"The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves."
"Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart;…"
"I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true. It might seem strange that …"
"At the height of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, V.S. Naipaul saw it as ‘a new, historical awakening’, of ‘Indians beco…"