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

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.

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.

You need someone to see what you've done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what's gone into it.

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

How could people like these, without words to put to their emotions and passions, manage? They could, at best, only suffer dumbly. Their pains and humiliations would work themselves out in their characters alone: like evil spirits possessing a body, so that the body itself might appear innocent of what it did.

My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.