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

It has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter'.

Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.

Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.

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.

The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.

I will say I am the sum of my books.