“A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.”

If one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay on in Africa.

Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self

One can’t measure how a mood of confidence comes about.

Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.

Music has no limits of a life-span.

There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.

I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.

As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.

Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.

Well, you know, in the fundamentalist milieu of the Afrikaners, there was a sense that they were a chosen people, that they were bringing civilization to the blacks.

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.

Politics is human beings; it’s addition rather than subtraction.

I’d like to think I’m a caring human being.

The revolution is made through human beings, but individuals must forge their revolutionary spirit day by day.

But I didn’t understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair.

Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him.

Human beings cannot be willed and molded into non-existence.

Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don’t say that you’ve wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.

A human being is a deciding being.