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...

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

I’ve never abandoned the novel.

I’m very content.

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

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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...

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.

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

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

In England people are very proud of being very stupid.

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.

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.

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...

Africa has no future.

Writers should provoke disagreement.

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

Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.

Making a book is such a big enterprise.

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...

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.

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.

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.

The world is always in movement.

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.

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.’

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.

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,...