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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" Nothing was made in Trinidad. "

" Writing has to support itself. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I'm very content. "

" That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which is never an easy thing to do. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The world is always in movement. "

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

" Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives. "