The Enigma Of Arrival - pg. 87

I had thought that because of my insecure past -- peasant India,
colonial Trinidad, my own family circumstances, the colonial smallness that
didn't consort with the grandeur of my ambition, my uprooting of myself for a
writing career, my coming to England with so little, and the very little I still
had to fall back on -- I had thought that because of this I had been given an
especially tender or raw sense of an unaccommodating world.