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

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.

Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature

Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.

Writing is making sense of life.

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

Perhaps the best way to write is to do so as if one were already dead, afraid of no one’s reactions, answerable to no one’s views.

Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.

The function of a writer is to make sense of life. It is such a mystery, it changes all the time, like the light.

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.

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.

I do my job like I breathe — so if I can’t breathe I’m in trouble.

If Donald Trump builds the wall the way he builds Trump Towers, he’ll be using illegal immigrant labor to do it.

When a person knows and can’t make the others understand, what does he do?

How defeated and restless the child that is not doing something in which it sees a purpose, a meaning! It is by its self-directed activity that the child, as years pass, finds its work, the thing it wants to do and for which it finally is willing to deny itself pleasure, ease, even sleep and comfort.

I would always do the songs that I wanted to do and the songs that my parents wanted me to do.

I think I dislike what I don’t like more than I like what I like.

The problem with kids these days is they don’t have enough fun stuff to do. When I was stationed with my family in Germany, youth basketball programs gave me something to strive to do my best at.

Excellence is a habit. You are what you repeatedly do.