Later he was to be famous and honoured through the Caribbean; he was to be a hero of the people. But when I first met him he was still a struggling masseur ... In those days people went by preference to the unqualified masseur or the quack dentist.

"I know the sort of doctors [they] have in Trinidad", my mother used to say. "They think nothing of killing two or three people before breakfast." That wasn't as bad as it sounds; in Trinidad the midday meal is called breakfast.

The Mystic Masseur, 1957 (first published novel)

The life that had come to Islam had not come from within. It had come from outside events and circumstances, the spread of the universal civilizations. It was the late 20th century that had made Islam revolutionary, giving new meaning to old Islamic ideas of equality and union, shaken up static or retarded societies. It was the late 20th century (and not the faith) that could supply the answers - in institutions, legislation, economic systems.
Half A Life, 2001

Among the Believers, 1981

To see the possibility, the certainty, of ruin, even at the moment of creation: it was my temperament. Those nerves had been given me as a child in Trinidad partly by our family circumstances: the half-ruined or broken down houses we lived in, our many moves, our general uncertainty.

The Enigma of Arrival, 1987

With each job description I read, I felt a tightening of what I must call my soul. I found myself growing false to myself, acting to myself, convincing myself of my rightness for whatever was being described. And this is where I suppose life ends for most people, who stiffen in the attitudes they adopt to make themselves suitable for the jobs and lives others have laid out for them.

A Bend in the River, 1979

She was fatigued by the lies she had had to tell about him, almost from the beginning, to cover up his drinking. It made her another kind of person. One afternoon she came back with the children and they found him drinking homemade banana spirit with the African gardener, a terrible old drunk ... She told [the children] that what their father was doing was all right; times were changing,and it was socially just in Africa for an estate manager to drink with his African gardener. Then she found that the children were beginning to lie too.