Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.
The world is always in movement.
The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
Africa has no future.
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.
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.
What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.
My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.
A cat only has itself.
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.
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.
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, but that they exist in specific ways and have specific realities.
In England people are very proud of being very stupid.
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.
Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.
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.
I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.
The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about 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 separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut.
