All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.

That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which is never an easy thing to do.

The world is always in movement.

The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.

We made no inquiries about India or about the families people had left behind. When our ways of thinking had changed, and we wished to know, it was too late. I know nothing of the people on my father's side; I know only that some of them came from Nepal.

The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.

But everything of value about me is in my books.

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

Argentine political life is like the life of an ant community or an African forest tribe: full of events, full of crisis and deaths, but life is always cyclical, and the year ends as it begins.

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.

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

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.

The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.

What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.

In Trinidad, where as new arrivals we were a disadvantaged community, that excluding idea was a kind of protection; it enabled us - for the time being, and only for the time being - to live in our own way and according to our own rules, to live in our own fading India.

I came to London. It had become the center of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost.

It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut.

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

All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.

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.

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

I will say I am the sum of my books.

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.

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.

A cat only has itself.

A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.

Africa has no future.

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.

Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand.

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

At school I had only admirers; I had no friends.

Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.

Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.

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.

I became very interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery.

I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.

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.

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.

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

I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.

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

I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.

I read many things. I read to fill in my knowledge of the world.

I really wasn't equipped to be a writer when I left Oxford. But then I set out to learn. I've always had the highest regard for the craft. I've always felt it was work.

I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.

I went to India and met some people who had been involved in this guerrilla business, middle-class people who were rather vain and foolish. There was no revolutionary grandeur to it. Nothing.

I've never abandoned the novel.

If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.