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" I've never abandoned the novel. "

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" 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. "

" 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. "

" The world is always in movement. "

" Africa is not a fun place, you know. A fun place is somewhere that lifts the spirits, that cossets the senses. I don't think that can be said of the Africa I traveled in. "

" 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. "

" 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 don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people. "

" 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. "

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

" It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut. "

" I've been a free man. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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.' "

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

" Writers should provoke disagreement. "

" 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. "

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

" 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 am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading. "

" A cat only has itself. "

" 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. "

" The writer is all alone. "

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

" 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. "

" But everything of value about me is in my books. "