One isn’t born one’s self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people’s ideas – and you have to work through it all.

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

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

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

What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And- though played out forms can throw up miraculous sports like The Importance of Being Earnest or Decline and Fall- what is good is always what is new, in both form and content. What is good forgets whatever models it might have had, and is unexpected; we have to catch it on the wing.

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

Small things start us in new ways of thinking