I went to India and met some people who had been involved in this guerrilla business, middle-class people who were rather vain and foolish. There was no revolutionary grandeur to it. Nothing.

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.

What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.

Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.

When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.

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.'

It's very attractive to people to be a victim. Instead of having to think out the whole situation, about history and your group and what you are doing... if you begin from the point of view of being a victim, you've got it half-made. I mean intellectually.

I read many things. I read to fill in my knowledge of the world.

It is important not to trust people too much.

The world is always in movement.

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

One must always try to see the truth of a situation - it makes things universal.

What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material. And the fictional form was going to force you to do things with the material, to dramatize it in a certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to explore the world, the other world, the world that one didn't know fully.

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.

Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.

I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands.