“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.”

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.

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.

Self praise is no praise at all.

I live, but live to die: and, living, see nothing to make death hateful, save an innate clinging, a loathsome and yet all invincible instinct of life, which I abhor, as I despise myself, yet cannot overcome – and so I live. Would I had never lived!

I have great hopes that we shall love each other all our lives as much as if we had never married at all.

Every dog is allowed one bite, but a different view is taken of a dog that goes on biting all the time. He may not get his licence returned when it falls due.

All things are in the Universe, and the universe is in all things: we in it, and it in us; in this way everything concurs in a perfect unity.

Are we savages or what?

If we are all made of God, it is our friends who remind us. We pass the gift of God to them. They pass it back to us when we need it most.

Is it ‘a drag’ that passions don’t come to us all at once, as epiphanies, without the need to actively develop them?