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

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" I'm very content. "

" 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. "

" The world is always in movement. "

" 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. "

" Africa has no future. "

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

" 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. "

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

" I've never abandoned the novel. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are. "

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

" Nothing was made in Trinidad. "

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

" An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "