“Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you’ve made sense of one small area.”

I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.

As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.

Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.

Well, you know, in the fundamentalist milieu of the Afrikaners, there was a sense that they were a chosen people, that they were bringing civilization to the blacks.

I’m forty-nine but I could be twenty-five except for my face and my legs.

The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it.

Communists are the last optimists.

You can’t change a regime on the basis of compassion. There’s got to be something harder.

Rebirth. I mean by this simply what happens when the child begins to realise the fact that the black does not enter through the white’s front door is not in the same category as the fact that the dead will never come back.

September 2001. A sunny day in New York. Many of us who are writers were at work on the transformation of life into a poem, story, a chapter of a novel, when terror pounced from the sky, and the world made witness to it.

it’s impossible to conquer all fear and loss by preparation. There are always sources of desolation that aren’t taken into account because no one knows what they will be.

The facts are always less than what really happened.

The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.

It’s absolutely fatal to your writing to think about how your work will be received. It’s a betrayal of whatever talent you have.

A desert is a place without expectation.

I’m a candle flame that sways in currents of air you can’t see. You need to be the one who steadies me to burn.

Segregations, by which I mean people living in a certain area, was a planned system.

My use of evenly repeated dots and diagonal lines and uninflected color areas suggest that my work is right where it is, right on the canvas, definitely not a window into the world.

Sanity lies somewhere between the inhibitions of conventional morality and the looseness of extreme impulse, but the area in-between is very fuzzy.

Truly, with a sitcom and the rhythms of comedy… music is so helpful in that area of life.

The memories of childhood have a strange shuttling quality, and areas of darkness ring the spaces of light.

I’ve been successful in different areas, but nothing brings a smile to my face more than my oldest son, Zaire, and my second son, Zion, saying the kind word of ‘Dad.’

There’s always going to be pressure, and there’s always going to be an area where you disappoint. As a storyteller, you have to understand that.

Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship.