I thought how terrible it would have been if, as could so easily have happened, I had died without knowing this depth of satisfaction, this other per… - V. S. Naipaul

In a cell like mine you very quickly become aware of your body. You can grow to hate your body. And your body is all you have: this was the curious thought that kept floating up through my rage.

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

It wasn't only the sand drifts and the mud and the narrow, winding, broken roads up in the mountains. There was all that business at the frontier posts, all that haggling in the forest outside wooden huts that flew strange flags. I had to talk myself and my Peugeot past the men with guns — just to drive through bush and more bush. And then I had to talk even harder, and shed a few more bank notes and give away more of my tinned food, to get myself — and the Peugeot — out of the places I had talked us into.

Some of these palavers could take half a day....

More than England to the British West Indian or even Holland to the Surinamer, France is the mother country to the Martiniquan.