Naipaul's reaction to Nigeria's Wole Soyinka winning the Nobel in 1986 (according to Paul Theroux): "Has he written anything?" Then adding that the Nobel Committee was, as usual, "pissing on literature from a great height."
Of Trinidad: "unimportant, uncreative, cynical, a dot on the map."
Of Islam: "It has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter'."
As he explained to Paul Theroux: "The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid people; and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and common."
At the opening of Cheltenham literature festival in 2001: "The trouble with people like me writing about societies where there is no intellectual life is that if you write about it, people are angry… If they read the book, which in most cases they don't, they want approval. Now India has improved, the books have been accepted… Forty years ago in India people were living in ritual. This is one of the things I have helped India with."
Naipaul's response to the question "What is the future in Africa?": "Africa has no future."
- Ikhide
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