“If I dreamt this, while walking, walking in the London streets, the subconscious of each and every other life, past and present, brushing me in passing, what makes it real? Writing it down.”

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.

Mostly I’m interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.

Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light – and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau – into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.

Newspapers are horror happening to other people.

We never pick up a brush and stand in front of our own easel.

Life gets so ridiculous, you just have to brush it off like sand and laugh. I think the laughter is good medicine for crap-itis.

Just as I work with paints, brushes, and canvas, I work with the light, pieces of glass and chemistry.

I don’t have a daily routine, beyond brushing my teeth. It changes every day.

I’m satisfied and proud of the things I did – even the bumps and the bruises that I’ve had on the way. You fall down, you get up, you brush yourself off and you keep going. And that’s what we’re doing.

I never draw except with brush and paint.

All I did was to look at what the universe showed me, to let my brush bear witness to it.

Thoughts on a tapestry. Colour or black and white. A brush, a pen, A flash of light. Ideas flowing soon, about to take flight.