I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
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.
I will say I am the sum of my books.
A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
A cat only has itself.
I've never abandoned the novel.
Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand.
Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.
You need someone to see what you've done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what's gone into it.
In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
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.
At school I had only admirers; I had no friends.
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.
The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.
I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.
Writing has to support 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.
Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms, break the forms.
Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will - with luck - come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise.
Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others...
