“Writing is making sense of life.”

If one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay on in Africa.

Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self

One can’t measure how a mood of confidence comes about.

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 is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes… we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions – especially selfish ones.

Richard Fliehr does not make any money.

I was so in love with the idea of making people laugh for a living that I didn’t care what I had to do to get there. Or how much money I was going to make when I did get there.

We are more interested in making others believe we are happy than in trying to be happy ourselves.

Nobody is making Americans buy Chinese goods.

Sun Microsystems had the right people to make Java into a first-class language.

Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope.

We only acknowledge small faults in order to make it appear that we are free from great ones.