“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.”

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.

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.

Wit consists in knowing the resemblance of things that differ, and the difference of things that are alike.

Nothing. The Infinite knows no time, no space, no great, no small, no beginning, no end.

I didn’t know Dan Wheldon, but he was big in motorsport, and then this year I got to know Marco Simoncelli, so our thoughts are with them at the moment.

Anybody who knows me… when I’m tired, I sleep with my eyes open.

I know only two tunes: one of them is ‘Yankee Doodle’, and the other isn’t.

What is a scientist after all? It is a curious man looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what’s going on.

In my life, I’ve seen everything, and one thing I know for sure is you can’t win in the federal court.

I know I’m not the only guy that’s had problems in life. And it seems to me that a lot of athletes shy away from talking about things that may have happened to them or their families.