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" I have a very small public. "

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

" The world is always in movement. "

" I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands. "

" I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people. "

" I've been a free man. "

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

" I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness. "

" 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. "

" You need someone to see what you've done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what's gone into it. "

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

" If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms, break the forms. "

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

" Africa has no future. "

" All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there. "

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

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

" In Trinidad, where as new arrivals we were a disadvantaged community, that excluding idea was a kind of protection; it enabled us - for the time being, and only for the time being - to live in our own way and according to our own rules, to live in our own fading India. "

" 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. "

" What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material. And the fictional form was going to force you to do things with the material, to dramatize it in a certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to explore the world, the other world, the world that one didn't know fully. "

" One is made by all the things around one. There are many things that have made one. For a writer to go around looking for things that have made him is asking for trouble. It's like giving a character to yourself. Can't do it. Can't do it. These things are just there. Is that enough? "

" If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don't express your disregard for the essence of the culture. It's a form of aggression. "

" I had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment. "

" In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon. "

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

" I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading. "

" 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. "

" The writer is all alone. "

" If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead. "

" That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which is never an easy thing to do. "

" If a man begins writing at thirty, by the time he is fifty or sixty, the bulk of his work has been done. By the time he is eighty, he's got nothing more, you know? "