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

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" The world is always in movement. "

" A cat only has itself. "

" 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. "

" One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" Africa has no future. "

" The first 50 years of the cinema were absolutely great years. Original minds were at work establishing the ways to tell a story. And what is happening now is a copying, a pastiche-ing of what was done by great men. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" The writer is all alone. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" The longer I live the more convinced I become that one of the greatest honors we can confer on other people is to see them as they are, to recognize not only that they exist, but that they exist in specific ways and have specific realities. "