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

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.

I have learned since that sometimes the things we want most are impossible for us. You may long to come home, yet wander forever.

Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.

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.

I always loved music, and I always wanted to make a film about it, but I could never do it because of the censorship that was around.

There should be no censorship of mail.

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

Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.

I have a very serious censorship office inside my head; it censors things that I could tell you that you would never forget, and I don’t want to be the person to stick that in your brain.

It seems now that the place where you see the most obvious censorship is on college campuses.

The [China] government has improved in the last years. Of course, the structure is still the same; there’s still a one-party system and strong censorship.

Self-censorship is insulting to the self. Timidity is a hopeless way forward.