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" All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right. "

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" Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it's complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he's able to keep processing that as well. "

" Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will - with luck - come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise. "

" It is important not to trust people too much. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" Making a book is such a big enterprise. "

" 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. "

" I will say I am the sum of my books. "

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

" 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. "

" I have a very small public. "

" 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. "

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

" Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background. "

" There are certain things that are too painful for people to even write about sometimes, and there are certain things that are too hard to read about again. "

" I went to India and met some people who had been involved in this guerrilla business, middle-class people who were rather vain and foolish. There was no revolutionary grandeur to it. Nothing. "

" When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Writing has to support itself. "

" If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account. "

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

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

" I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs. "

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

" 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. "

" One must always try to see the truth of a situation - it makes things universal. "

" I've been a free man. "

" To be a writer you have to be out in the world, you have to risk yourself in the world, you have to be immersed in the world, you have to go out looking for it. This becomes harder as you get older because there's less energy, the days are shorter for older people and it's not so easy to go out and immerse oneself in the world outside. "