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" 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. "

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

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

" Making a book is such a big enterprise. "

" 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. "

" There are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to. "

" I have a very small public. "

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

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

" Writing has to support itself. "

" In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

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

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

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

" I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world. "