“For mines are for men, not for money. And money is not something to go mad about, and throw your hat into the air for.”

Behind the polished panelling the white ant eats away the wood. Nothing is ever quiet, except for fools

For who can stop the heart from breaking?

because life slips away, and because I need for the rest of my journey a star that will not play false to me, a compass that will not lie.

The tragedy is that things are not mended again.

I envision someday a great, peaceful South Africa in which the world will take pride, a nation in which each of many different groups will be making its own creative contribution.

When I go up there, which is my intention, the Big Judge will say to me, Where are your wounds? and if I say I haven’t any, he will say, Was there nothing to fight for?

Then some unknown rebellion brewed in you, doing harm to you, though how I do not understand.

I have never thought that a Christian would be free of suffering, umfundisi.

If you wrote a novel in South Africa which didn’t concern the central issues, it wouldn’t be worth publishing.

Pain and suffering, they are a secret. Kindness and love, they are a secret.

There is only one way in which one can endure man’s inhumanity to man and that is to try, in one’s own life, to exemplify man’s humanity to man.

The sun pours down on the earth, on the lovely land that man cannot enjoy. He knows only the fear of his heart.

Nothing is ever quiet, except for fools.

All roads lead to Johannesburg.

It was not his habit to dwell on what could have been, but what could never be.

St. Francis of Assisi taught me that there is a wound in the Creation and that the greatest use we could make of our lives was to ask to be made a healer of it.

When I see old movies with women in floor-length dressing gowns, or when they’re going to the store and they’ve got a pillbox hat with a net over the eyes and white gloves,

I’ll never forget the time my mother showed up with her best friend and two daughters, and all four of us dressed up in matching clothes, shoes and hats to go pick up my brother from school.

My hats did give me an identity. In fact, if I had a dollar for every time someone has seen me bareheaded and said, ‘I almost didn’t recognize you without a hat on’, I could have bought the Cowboys myself.

A hat should be taken off when you greet a lady and left off for the rest of your life. Nothing looks more stupid than a hat.

Is that I get to constantly do different things, put on different hats, be different people, and mixing up the genre really lends itself to that.

You can’t just tip your hat to Jesus; you must bow your knee.

I feel that I am just a storyteller, and whether I am wearing the director hat or the playwright hat, it doesn’t matter.

I enjoy hats. And when one has filthy hair, that is a good accessory.