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.
Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.
If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.
Nothing was made in Trinidad.
The family feuds or the village feuds often had to do with an idea of honor. Perhaps it was a peasant idea; perhaps this idea of honor is especially important to a society without recourse to law or without confidence in law.
Some lesser husbands built a latrine on the hillside.
If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don't express your disregard for the essence of the culture. It's a form of aggression.
I wish my prose to be transparentI don't want the reader to stumble over me; I want him to look through what I'm saying to what I'm describing. I don't want him ever to say, Oh, goodness, how nicely written this is. That would be a failure.
I often wonder what would have happened to me if I hadn't made that decision. I suppose I would have sunk. I suppose I would have found some kind of hole and tried to hide or pass. After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities. I would have hidden in my hole and been crippled by my sentimentality, doing what I was doing, and doing it well, but always looking for the wailing wall. And I would never have seen the world as the rich place that it is. You wouldn't have seen me here in Africa, doing what I do.
All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.
In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
I've never abandoned the novel.
I became very interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery.
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.
I don't feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
I'm my own writer. My material means I'm entirely separate.
The writer is all alone.
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.
All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.
I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
I have a very small public.
I've been a free man.
I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world.
I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
Follow AzQuotes on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Every day we present the best quotes! Improve yourself, find your inspiration, share with friends
or simply: