Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.
This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true.
Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it's complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he's able to keep processing that as well.
Africa is not a fun place, you know. A fun place is somewhere that lifts the spirits, that cossets the senses. I don't think that can be said of the Africa I traveled in.
The world is always in movement.
We made no inquiries about India or about the families people had left behind. When our ways of thinking had changed, and we wished to know, it was too late. I know nothing of the people on my father's side; I know only that some of them came from Nepal.
Africa has no future.
I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.
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.
I had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment.
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.