"I don’t know why they still building houses," Mr Biswas said. "Nobody don’t want a house these days. They just want a coal barrel. One coal barrel f… - V. S. Naipaul

"On the front cover of Newsweek reviews "A House for Mr. Biswas" as "a marvelous prose epic that matches the best 19th century novels for richness of comic insight and final, tragic power.

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

India is old, and India continues. But all the disciplines and skills that India now seeks to exercise are borrowed. Even the ideas Indians have of the achievements of their civilization are essentially the ideas given them by European scholars in the nineteenth century. India by itself could not have rediscovered or assessed its past. Its past was too much with it, was still being lived out in the ritual, the laws, the magic – the complex instinctive life that muffles response and buries even the idea of inquiry.