“In various and different circumstances certain objects and individuals are going to turn out to be vital. The wager of survival cannot, by its nature, reveal which, in advance of events.”

Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.

Music has no limits of a life-span.

There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.

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.

Drawing an object that has a certain amount of wear and tear or rust; or a tree that is damaged.

I think there’s no question that the barriers, the fences and in certain urban areas, the walls, have had an important effect in terms of increasing the manageability and the security of the border.

We live in a time where there’s an alienation factor. There’s a certain disconnection.

I certainly believe that what we perceive as humans is just the tip of the iceberg.

Certainly if someone looks at my life, they will see that I have surrendered my heart, my life to Jesus Christ.

To refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.

I just try and learn to be a good husband and be a good father before I am a good rock star. That means saying no to certain things that go with the business.

Unless you have a sense of values that’s shared by people and turns them loose to do certain things on their own within those sets of values.