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" I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea. "

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

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

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

" What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" But everything of value about me is in my books. "

" My life is short. I can't listen to banality. "

" 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. "

" Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe. "

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

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

" I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred. "

" I became very interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery. "

" My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world. "

" 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. "

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

" Making a book is such a big enterprise. "

" Africa is not a fun place, you know. A fun place is somewhere that lifts the spirits, that cossets the senses. I don't think that can be said of the Africa I traveled in. "

" 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? "

" Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand. "

" I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. "

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

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

" 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. "

" The writer is all alone. "

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

" Africa has no future. "

" 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. "