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

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.

Peace. The upland serenity of high altitude, the openness of grassland without indigenous bush or trees; the greening, yellowing or silver-browning that prevailed, according to season.

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.

in writing, sex doesn’t matter; it’s the writing that matters.

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.

I shall never write an autobiography, I’m much too jealous of my privacy for that.

From Ernest Hemingway’s stories I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.

Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.

If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there’d be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.

Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.

The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.

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

People give one another things that can’t be gift wrapped.

Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you’ve made sense of one small area.

Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.

I don’t do films because they tell a particular kind of story, I do films with stories that touch me.

Med students panic their first year when they learn all the diseases. It’s not until the second year that they learn the cures.

True states of realization occur when you throw away all the teachings. All of the teachings, absolutely. Everything. Then you are investigation itself finding out what you are.

All of my scenes were with Jason Isaacs. I could definitely see myself going on an adventure with him, and learning as an actor from him.

Baseball has the largest library of law and love and custom and ritual, and therefore, in a nation that fundamentally believes it is a nation under law, well, baseball is America’s most privileged version of the level field.

Such is the audacity of man, that he hath learned to counterfeit Nature, yea, and is so bold as to challenge her in her work.

Talking to Yogi Berra about baseball is like talking to Homer about the Gods.

Have you ever learned the beautiful art of letting God take care of you and giving all your thought and strength to pray for others and for the kingdom of God? It will relieve you of a thousand cares.