“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 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.

Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship.

Perhaps the best way to write is to do so as if one were already dead, afraid of no one’s reactions, answerable to no one’s views.

Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.

The function of a writer is to make sense of life. It is such a mystery, it changes all the time, like the light.

A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.

Very often we support change, and then are swept away by the change. I think that…you just make your own response to your own generation. A response adequate to your time.

Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.

Time is change; we measure its passage by how much things alter.

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.

I like to do the pictures before people get too self-conscious. I like to be spontaneous and get a shot before the subject thinks too much about it.

Once the light of our awareness is cast on any darkness, then it cannot hide and it cannot remain. Such is the law of consciousness.

It is your soul’s journey to enroll the ego in the quest for the ultimate victory – the evolution of your own individual consciousness.

People are doing the best that they can from their own level of consciousness.

To experience relationships of substance and depth requires approaching and entering into relationships with consciousness and concern for the other.

Whenever a woman would come too close, I would cut her off. Part of that was vindictive – but that was totally subconscious.

Are you fully conscious of your worth? Are you a person or a universe?

When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.