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

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" 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. "

" Writers should provoke disagreement. "

" The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next. "

" Nothing was made in Trinidad. "

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

" 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. "

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

" What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" In England people are very proud of being very stupid. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate. "

" I've been a free man. "

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

" 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. "

" The world is always in movement. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don't express your disregard for the essence of the culture. It's a form of aggression. "

" 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. "

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