“It was a miracle; it was all a miracle: and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles are horror.”

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.

It was also the root cause of EC’s success; kids were looking for ways to numb themselves to this horror that they felt.

In our dreams (writes Coleridge) images represent the sensations we think they cause; we do not feel horror because we are threatened by a sphinx; we dream of a sphinx in order to explain the horror we feel.

In my own personal time, horror films freak me out too much, so I tend to steer clear of watching horror films on my own.

In all the horror films that I have done.

I had the honor to meet Geraldine Ferraro on a few occasions over the years at the DNC and what struck me was how she managed to be both gutsy and graceful at the same time.

If we’re going to be considered horror filmmakers, we have to prove it not only to ourselves, but to the audience that we can actually make something scary.

There are only a few genres, horror and comedy, where you can get that immediate feedback from the audience.

Broad daylight does not encourage the apprehension of horror.