“Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.”

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.

when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.

Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.

It was a miracle; it was all a miracle: and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles are horror.

Writers themselves don’t analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.

I decided that I wanted nothing to do with South African government television while any of my fellow writers were banned and couldn’t speak publicly.

Aristotle and many others say men have more teeth than women.

What we have is a gift from Him. What we do with what we have is our gift to him

William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. “In the time of your life–live!”

If you have a big problem in your life, all that means is that you are being a small person!

You always want what you can’t have, and that all-American thing, from the day I was born,

I think I understand what military fame is; to be killed on the field of battle and have your name misspelled in the newspapers.

It means I have a responsibility to make sure that all public spending is justified.

I simply haven’t the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.