Monique Roffey

“Long-term heterosexual monogamy is still the dominant model: men and women still want to pair for a long period of time.”

“Apart from writing books, my 40s have been about pursuing personal growth. Whatever were the mistakes of my earlier life, I've been committed to a pause, a regroup. I don't want to make the same mistakes in the future.”

“Trinidadians love speaking their own English; it's full of poetic forms and can be playful and lyrical and comical. Trinidadians are verbal acrobats, and I love being on the island just to hear the people speak.”

“The romantic idealism of my youth has been replaced with realism and hard work at what I love.”

“All my books explore fatherhood. I look at what it means to have a big father figure at the centre: sometimes they're a good father, sometimes bad.”

“The person I love most is the Dalai Lama. China destroyed his country, yet he says that it's imperative we show love for the Chinese.”

“While I am most at home in London, I cannot really label myself as either British or Trinidadian. I write in the English language and live in the U.K. I find it hard to say that I am an entirely British writer, especially when I supported Trinidad in the 2006 World Cup and also support the West Indies cricket team.”

“I was an observant but dreamy child. I had a lazy eye and wild curls.”

“Born on an island, I could swim before I could walk, thrown many times into swimming pools and warm transparent Caribbean waters: sink or swim, that was my first lesson. While I'm not a natural athlete, I'm still a strong swimmer and feel a great affinity with the sea.”

“That's what a poem is. Words which have a hidden meaning. A poem is like a secret.”

“He had a strange relationship with books. He had the notion that people who wrote novels were also lonely. He believed this more and more, reading between the lines of the novels he'd loved. Most books were about one kind of loneliness or another, about people who couldn't get what they wanted, people who found things hard, who were slow, or sad, or difficult. So he read most evenings, finding a comfort in following words written by someone like him.”

“I made myself unhappy measuring my love against a given norm. The truth is, we make ourselves happy in among a wide variety of loves; all count.”

“Travelling, he'd always thought, was where he'd meet his other self. Somewhere in a foreign place, he would bump into the bit of himself which was lost.”

“My parents had a long and eventful marriage and were always a bit like movie stars to me when they were young.”

“What I always knew about my parents was that they were in love, and this love had a fizz. It was exciting to be their child, to be around them. There was a dynamism between them, a charge.”

“New Year's Eve is not about having a big party for me. It's a time of reflection, and I often go on spiritual retreats.”

“At the age of 62, my father died of cancer - it was much too soon. My mother never remarried or got over it, never even thought of another man.”

“I talk to myself. It's my worst habit. I often muse aloud, or, when people drive me crazy, I curse them aloud. I might do a ranting monologue about how pissed off I am about them, occasionally forgetting that they might still be in the room; now, that's weird!”

“'The White Woman on the Green Bicycle' is a love story mapped onto an unfolding political tragedy: that of the failure of the Independence era in Trinidad.”

“Trinidad's language is a fusion of English, African, and French, and so we have our own words and even our own dictionary. Steupse is a common local word, and it's the onomatopoeic word for the sound people make to show disapproval, or to show they are vexed, when they suck their teeth together.”