I will say I am the sum of my books.

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

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

But everything of value about me is in my books.

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...

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

Nothing was made in Trinidad.

My life is short. I can’t listen to banality.

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

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...

If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.

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

I’m thought to be a tough writer, but I’m really a softie.

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...

Writing has to support itself.

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

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

It is important not to trust people too much.

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...

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.