V. S. Naipaul

How can you be an atheist and have an ideology to go with it? To be an atheist is to be free of some areas of belief. I don't see how that can become an ideology.

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

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.'

I've always been very determined, ever since I was a little girl, to make my way.

I grew up on a sugar plantation in Trinidad, on an expat estate, and that meant I had no idea about money until a lot later than most children.