V. S. Naipaul

It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here.

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Worse, to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one’s portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one has been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated.

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The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves.

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In the beginning, before the arrival of the white men, I had considered myself neutral. I had wanted neither side to win, neither the army nor the rebels. As it turned out, both sides lost.

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If it was Europe that gave us on the coast some idea of our history, it was Europe, I feel, that also introduced us to the lie.

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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 rise to twenty. When it drops to two he waits for it to get back to ten.

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Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves.

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One isn’t born one’s self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people’s ideas—and you have to work through it all.

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