Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" Writers should provoke disagreement. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" Nothing was made in Trinidad. "

" This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" I've been a free man. "

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

" I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands. "

" Writing has to support itself. "

" 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? "

" Argentine political life is like the life of an ant community or an African forest tribe: full of events, full of crisis and deaths, but life is always cyclical, and the year ends as it begins. "