“People give one another things that can’t be gift wrapped.”

The Communist Party is very popular in South Africa, especially among the young people. Never having had a chance to travel, and having suffered so much under capitalism, they still can’t believe that the Russian people themselves have rejected it.

What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there’s another force from inside battling to make us something else.

when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.

Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.

It was a miracle; it was all a miracle: and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles are horror.

Writers themselves don’t analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.

I decided that I wanted nothing to do with South African government television while any of my fellow writers were banned and couldn’t speak publicly.

Writing is always a voyage of discovery.

About the joys and the courage, I really don’t know what other people think. I just know that I’ve never left Africa. I’ve lived there all my life. And one of the wonderful things, in spite of all the terrible things that happen in South Africa, is the way people continue to keep their dignity.

Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.

The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful.

A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.

It’s easier for the former masters to put aside the masks that hid their humanity than for the former slaves to recognise the faces underneath. Or to trust that this is not a new mask these are wearing.

The gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind’s eye only, fade out in sand.

I cannot live with someone who can’t live without me.

Perhaps the best definition of progress would be the continuing efforts of men and women to narrow the gap between the convenience of the powers that be and the unwritten charter.

My second novel, “Good Benito”, was not finished. I wished that I had spent another year with it.

We used to say that inside Cecil Beaton there was another Cecil Beaton sending out lots of little Cecils into the world. One did the sets, another did the costumes.

Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term.

That requires that we listen to one another and get challenged and grow by living with difference within the body of the church.

Nor can private counterparties restrict supplies of gold, another commodity whose derivatives are often traded over-the-counter, where central banks stand ready to lease gold in increasing quantities should the price rise.

If you’re crazy, there’s two things you can do to make yourself feel better: One is to get yourself cured. The other is to make everyone you have to deal with crazy.

The Brady ‘Campaign Against Illegal Guns’ is yet another crusade whose ultimate goal is to trample the Second Amendment into dust.

There’s a very simple reason for focusing on the nuclear issue. Many, many issues are of supreme importance in one way or another, but if we blow ourselves up with nuclear weapons, no other issue is really going to matter.