I had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment.
To be a writer you have to be out in the world, you have to risk yourself in the world, you have to be immersed in the world, you have to go out looking for it. This becomes harder as you get older because there's less energy, the days are shorter fo...
If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don't express your disregard for the essence of the culture. It's a form of aggression.
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.
One is made by all the things around one. There are many things that have made one. For a writer to go around looking for things that have made him is asking for trouble. It's like giving a character to yourself. Can't do it. Can't do it. These thing...
I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
But everything of value about me is in my books.
I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world.
The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.
I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
Nothing was made in Trinidad.
In England people are very proud of being very stupid.
Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
I've been a free man.
It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
Perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but, rather, the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled...in a unique and inimitable way.
Act of giving something to others is an art of flowering your heart.
At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.
The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books.
...I happen to be the kind of author who in starting to work on a book has no purpose than to get rid of that book....
