I will say I am the sum of my books.

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.

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...

The biography of a writer – or even the autobiography – will always have this incompleteness.

I have a very small public.

I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written...

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

You need someone to see what you’ve done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what’s gone into it.

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

What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material. And the fictional form was going to force you to do things with the material, to...

The writer is all alone.

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

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...

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.

If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don’t express your disregard for the essence of the culture. It’s a form of aggression.

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.

A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.

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

I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.

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

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

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.

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

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...

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.