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

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

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.

Your whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place– a single book written from different stages of your ability.

I never talk about what I’m writing about currently, never. It’s private work on your own, no need or obligation to talk about it. Writers are made into performers these days, including myself, but there are some instances in which I will not perform.

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

a writer doesn’t only need the time when he’s actually writing – he or she has got to have time to think and time just to let things work out. Nothing is worse for this than society. Nothing is worse for this than the abrasive, if enjoyable, effect of other people.

The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It’s quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.

The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.

If you live in Europe . . . things change . . . but continuity never seems to break. You don’t have to throw the past away.

I couldn’t be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.

Can you imagine a writer in England influencing? Absolutely not. And in France? It used to be, but no more-absolutely not. France used to, at least, have writers as diplomats, but not any more.

Mostly I’m interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.

If I dreamt this, while walking, walking in the London streets, the subconscious of each and every other life, past and present, brushing me in passing, what makes it real? Writing it down.

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.

Operating to implement a balance and give us an opportunity to turn the horrors we’ve forced upon each other into something more conducive to sustaining at least minimal degrees of sanity and love.

Wes Craven is obviously a horror film icon so I was definitely very interested in bringing something back to life that Wes had created.

People love roller coasters. People love skydiving. These things that really get your heart pumping, and horror films are sort of a safe way to get that rush I guess.

I do know that I’ve read somewhere that it’s been statistically proven that in times of war, horror films are much more popular. I don’t know why that is. You’d think it’d be the opposite. You’d think people would want to escape from it.

The function of poetry is religious invocation of the muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites.

Its raining love throw the umbrella away, do not shield me for love holds peace not terror.

I am trying my hardest to stay away from the horror movies just because I feel like people are thinking that’s what I do, that I’m a scream queen. I’d like to stay away from that.

For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life.