Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing. "

Related Quotes:

" 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? "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Making a book is such a big enterprise. "

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

" 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. "

" How can you be an atheist and have an ideology to go with it? To be an atheist is to be free of some areas of belief. I don't see how that can become an ideology. "

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

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

" One is made by all the things around one. There are many things that have made one. For a writer to go around looking for things that have made him is asking for trouble. It's like giving a character to yourself. Can't do it. Can't do it. These things are just there. Is that enough? "

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

" What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material. And the fictional form was going to force you to do things with the material, to dramatize it in a certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to explore the world, the other world, the world that one didn't know fully. "

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

" I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time. "

" 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. "

" The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it. "

" The writer is all alone. "

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

" 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've been a free man. "

" 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. "

" 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. "