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" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" The writer is all alone. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I've been a free man. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" 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.' "

" If a man begins writing at thirty, by the time he is fifty or sixty, the bulk of his work has been done. By the time he is eighty, he's got nothing more, you know? "

" We made no inquiries about India or about the families people had left behind. When our ways of thinking had changed, and we wished to know, it was too late. I know nothing of the people on my father's side; I know only that some of them came from Nepal. "

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

" 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 first 50 years of the cinema were absolutely great years. Original minds were at work establishing the ways to tell a story. And what is happening now is a copying, a pastiche-ing of what was done by great men. "

" Africa has no future. "

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

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

" Nothing was made in Trinidad. "

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

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