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

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

" The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness. "

" In England I am not English, in India I am not Indian. I am chained to the 1,000 square miles that is Trinidad; but I will evade that fate yet. "

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

" An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally. "

" The world is always in movement. "

" 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. "

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

" It's very attractive to people to be a victim. Instead of having to think out the whole situation, about history and your group and what you are doing... if you begin from the point of view of being a victim, you've got it half-made. I mean intellectually. "

" Making a book is such a big enterprise. "

" I've been a free man. "

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

" As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are. "

" I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time. "

" We made no inquiries about India or about the families people had left behind. When our ways of thinking had changed, and we wished to know, it was too late. I know nothing of the people on my father's side; I know only that some of them came from Nepal. "

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

" 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. "

" To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter.' "

" Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand. "

" 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. "

" Writing has to support itself. "

" In England people are very proud of being very stupid. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Writers should provoke disagreement. "

" I read many things. I read to fill in my knowledge of the world. "

" 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. "