“When I was a child, we seemed to be living in a world remote from the rest of the world. But television has made a great difference to all of us.”

A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.

Very often we support change, and then are swept away by the change. I think that…you just make your own response to your own generation. A response adequate to your time.

Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.

Time is change; we measure its passage by how much things alter.

Sentiment is for those who don’t know what to do next.

Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.

In a country like South Africa, writers have nuisance value, because those of us who have become known overseas have certainly helped to inform people about what life is like there.

Your whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place– a single book written from different stages of your ability.

I never talk about what I’m writing about currently, never. It’s private work on your own, no need or obligation to talk about it. Writers are made into performers these days, including myself, but there are some instances in which I will not perform.

Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.

a writer doesn’t only need the time when he’s actually writing – he or she has got to have time to think and time just to let things work out. Nothing is worse for this than society. Nothing is worse for this than the abrasive, if enjoyable, effect of other people.

The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It’s quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.

The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.

If you live in Europe . . . things change . . . but continuity never seems to break. You don’t have to throw the past away.

I couldn’t be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.

Can you imagine a writer in England influencing? Absolutely not. And in France? It used to be, but no more-absolutely not. France used to, at least, have writers as diplomats, but not any more.

Stay with me tonight. Let me hold you even if that’s all it is. Let me keep you safe.

But the ultimate lesson is just sit down and write. That’s all.

The Great Spirit made all things. He gave the white people a home beyond the great waters. He supplied these grounds with game, and gave them to his red children; and he gave them strength and courage to defend them.

Take me away from all this Death.

If you are not a thinking man, to what purpose are you a man at all?.

We are all part of some great cycle, some pattern that it was only God’s purpose to understand.

‘How do you juggle it all?’ people constantly ask me, with an accusatory look in their eyes. ‘You’re screwing it all up, aren’t you?’ their eyes say.

Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth.