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

Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.

Music has no limits of a life-span.

There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.

I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.

As writers, we are exploring the mystery, the mystery of existence.

Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.

Well, you know, in the fundamentalist milieu of the Afrikaners, there was a sense that they were a chosen people, that they were bringing civilization to the blacks.

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.

My feeling about work is it’s much more about the experience of doing it than the end product. Sometimes things that are really great and make lots of money are miserable to make, and vice versa.

I love what I do so I find ways to keep doing what I love. Music is certainly not all that interests me.

When I start writing, I do two pages a day; if I’m gonna do 320, that’s 160 days.

Actually I like working kind of fast, because if you got it, why bother doing it over and over?

While making art you should just do what is in your heart.

If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.

What he does with it, that’s something else, but he’s got it all. The talent, the instrument is there, that’s why he has endured.

No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.