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

Writing is always a voyage of discovery.

About the joys and the courage, I really don’t know what other people think. I just know that I’ve never left Africa. I’ve lived there all my life. And one of the wonderful things, in spite of all the terrible things that happen in South Africa, is the way people continue to keep their dignity.

Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.

The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful.

A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.

It’s easier for the former masters to put aside the masks that hid their humanity than for the former slaves to recognise the faces underneath. Or to trust that this is not a new mask these are wearing.

The gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind’s eye only, fade out in sand.

I cannot live with someone who can’t live without me.

Perhaps the best definition of progress would be the continuing efforts of men and women to narrow the gap between the convenience of the powers that be and the unwritten charter.

Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature

Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.

Writing is making sense of life.

I’ve never had any illusions about being a lead actor in films, because lead actors have to be of a certain kind. Apart from the beauty of looks and figure, which I cannot claim to have, there’s just a particular kind of ordinary-Joe quality that a film star needs to have.

When someone is a musician – trying to make a living off being a public figure – it’s really easy for people to see me as a face on a screen that doesn’t have a personal life.

If there is a supreme being, he’s crazy.

I think people don’t realize how little of being an artist is making art.

People won’t want powers being handed back from bureaucrats in Brussels to be given to bureaucrats in Britain.

The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their whole life in the hands of some other person. I would describe this method of searching for happiness as immature. Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.

Rich people are committed to being rich. Poor people want to be rich.

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.