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

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.

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

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'.

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

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.

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