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

But everything of value about me is in my books.

I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.

Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.

The first 50 years of the cinema were absolutely great years. Original minds were at work establishing the ways to tell a story. And what is happening now is a copying, a pastiche-ing of what was done by great men.

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.

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