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

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" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

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

" Africa has no future. "

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

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" 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. "

" I came to London. It had become the center of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost. "

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

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

" A cat only has itself. "

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

" 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. "

" 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 had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" Making a book is such a big enterprise. "

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