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

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.

The family feuds or the village feuds often had to do with an idea of honor. Perhaps it was a peasant idea; perhaps this idea of honor is especially important to a society without recourse to law or without confidence in law.

The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.

It took time to really build myself a reputation as a good live performer, a musician and an artist.

Learn to be difficult when it counts. In school as in life, having a reputation for being assertive will help you receive preferential treatment without having to beg or fight for it every time.

Our reputations precedes us. If I know someone is not nice, not kind, an asshole – I generally don’t want to work with them.

I have the reputation of being easygoing. But inside, I’m like nails. I will kill.

Do not leave your reputation to chance or gossip; it is your life’s artwork, and you must craft it, hone it, and display it with the care of an artist.

I have a reputation for being hermitlike. I’m not. I’m just obsessed with my work.

Although the devil be the father of lies, he seems, like other great inventors, to have lost much of his reputation by the continual improvements that have been made upon him.

I think there is a huge difference between writers who have very big sales, and writers who have small sales. Even writers with very high reputations, even Nobel prize winners, often sell in very low figures.