“I’m a candle flame that sways in currents of air you can’t see. You need to be the one who steadies me to burn.”

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’s absolutely fatal to your writing to think about how your work will be received. It’s a betrayal of whatever talent you have.

A desert is a place without expectation.

I have learned since that sometimes the things we want most are impossible for us. You may long to come home, yet wander forever.

Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.

The Communist Party is very popular in South Africa, especially among the young people. Never having had a chance to travel, and having suffered so much under capitalism, they still can’t believe that the Russian people themselves have rejected it.

In my dressing room, you’ll definitely find some Starbursts and Skittles. I have a lot of candles that remind me of home, and a humidifier for my voice. I also have some digital Kodak albums where I have pictures of my friends and family.

It’s time to blow out the candles on the pity party cake.

Follow your pain as if it were a candle in the night, leading you to a place of decision.

I think perhaps I will always hold a candle for you – even until it burns my hand. And when the light has long since gone I will be there in the darkness holding what remains, quite simply because I cannot let go.

All my life has been a struggle to know, what to hold on and what to let go, but still, i end up sitting in the corner of the room with a flickering candle, whimpering, naked, shuddering, lost.

You blew me off to have your wish. But what other purpose do candles serve?

All I know to do is to light the candle that has been given to me.

A candle cannot burn without fire as people cannot live without a religion.