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

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.

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.

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 never talk about what I’m writing about currently, never. It’s private work on your own, no need or obligation to talk about it. Writers are made into performers these days, including myself, but there are some instances in which I will not perform.

Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.

a writer doesn’t only need the time when he’s actually writing – he or she has got to have time to think and time just to let things work out. Nothing is worse for this than society. Nothing is worse for this than the abrasive, if enjoyable, effect of other people.

The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It’s quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.

The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.

If you live in Europe . . . things change . . . but continuity never seems to break. You don’t have to throw the past away.

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

Can you imagine a writer in England influencing? Absolutely not. And in France? It used to be, but no more-absolutely not. France used to, at least, have writers as diplomats, but not any more.

We mean far more to God than the work we do.

The Internet really does create this dimension around the music that’s always in relation to what else is happening at the moment.

The success of SYNC is another proof point that we are doing just that.

Don’t worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

I don’t mind that I’ve created an identity around what I do.

All to often, however, what she [the woman] does want is the man she hopes she will make out of the man she already has.

Now it’s just sharp elbows, and instead of having a caucus where you sit down and say, ‘What are you doing for your country?’ you sit figuring out how to screw the other side.

What I enjoy doing more than anything is.