Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world.
The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.
All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.
I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.
We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.
Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.
You can't deny what you've learned; you can't deny your travels; you can't deny the nature of your life.
I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands.
The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.
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.
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.
My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.
I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.
You need someone to see what you've done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what's gone into it.
I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.
I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.
When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.
I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.
It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling.
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.
If it was Europe that gave us on the coast some idea of our history, it was Europe, I feel, that also introduced us to the lie.
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.
Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.
The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid people; and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and common.
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.
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.
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.
Life is a helluva thing. You can see trouble coming and you can't do a damn thing to prevent it coming. You just got to sit and watch and wait.
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.
And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of victory fills a moment and then is over
Where jargon turns living issues into abstractions, and where jargon ends by competing with jargon, people don't have causes. They only have enemies.
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.
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.
Life doesn't have a neat beginning and a tidy end; life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should be all there.
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.
Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there.
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 ideology.
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?
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.
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.
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.'
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.
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 Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves.
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 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.
In the beginning, before the arrival of the white men, I had considered myself neutral. I had wanted neither side to win, neither the army nor the rebels. As it turned out, both sides lost.