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

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" At school I had only admirers; I had no friends. "

" To be a writer you have to be out in the world, you have to risk yourself in the world, you have to be immersed in the world, you have to go out looking for it. This becomes harder as you get older because there's less energy, the days are shorter for older people and it's not so easy to go out and immerse oneself in the world outside. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" I'm very content. "

" 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. "

" Great writing can be done in biography, history, art. "

" Writers should provoke disagreement. "

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

" 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've never abandoned the novel. "

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

" When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day. "

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

" 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 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. "

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

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

" I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years. "

" Making a book is such a big enterprise. "

" 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. "

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

" 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? "

" I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs. "