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

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

" 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. "

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

" I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

" I've never abandoned the novel. "

" There are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

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

" I really wasn't equipped to be a writer when I left Oxford. But then I set out to learn. I've always had the highest regard for the craft. I've always felt it was work. "

" The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next. "