Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

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

Related Quotes:

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

" 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. "

" Argentine political life is like the life of an ant community or an African forest tribe: full of events, full of crisis and deaths, but life is always cyclical, and the year ends as it begins. "

" 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. "

" 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? "

" 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. "

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

" Writers should provoke disagreement. "

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

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

" 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? "

" 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. "

" Making a book is such a big enterprise. "

" 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. "

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

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

" All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The world is always in movement. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" I've never abandoned the novel. "

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