I will say I am the sum of my books.

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

I’ve never abandoned the novel.

I’m very content.

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...

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 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.

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.

A cat only has itself.

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 a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.

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

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.

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...

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...

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?

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

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.

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

In England people are very proud of being very stupid.

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...

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.

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

Africa has no future.

Writers should provoke disagreement.

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...

Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.

Making a book is such a big enterprise.

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.

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.

The world is always in movement.

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

I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

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

I don’t feel I can speak with authority for many other people.

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,...

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.

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

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

I’ve been a free man.

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

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

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

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...

I became very interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery.

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

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

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.