“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.”

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

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.

The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.

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

It is important not to trust people too much.

Writing has to support itself.

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

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 only after some years.

It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.

All cultures have been mingled forever.

In England people are very proud of being very stupid.

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.

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

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.

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.