“It’s easier for the former masters to put aside the masks that hid their humanity than for the former slaves to recognise the faces underneath. Or to trust that this is not a new mask these are wearing.”

Can you imagine a writer in England influencing? Absolutely not. And in France? It used to be, but no more-absolutely not. France used to, at least, have writers as diplomats, but not any more.

Mostly I’m interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.

If I dreamt this, while walking, walking in the London streets, the subconscious of each and every other life, past and present, brushing me in passing, what makes it real? Writing it down.

Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light – and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau – into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.

Newspapers are horror happening to other people.

Peace. The upland serenity of high altitude, the openness of grassland without indigenous bush or trees; the greening, yellowing or silver-browning that prevailed, according to season.

When I was a child, we seemed to be living in a world remote from the rest of the world. But television has made a great difference to all of us.

in writing, sex doesn’t matter; it’s the writing that matters.

In various and different circumstances certain objects and individuals are going to turn out to be vital. The wager of survival cannot, by its nature, reveal which, in advance of events.

I shall never write an autobiography, I’m much too jealous of my privacy for that.

From Ernest Hemingway’s stories I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.

Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.

If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there’d be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.

Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.

The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.

Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.