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.
It’s easier for the former masters to put aside the masks that hid their humanity than for the former slaves to recognise the faces underneath. Or to trust that this is not a new mask these are wearing.
Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.
Perhaps the best definition of progress would be the continuing efforts of men and women to narrow the gap between the convenience of the powers that be and the unwritten charter.
If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there’d be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.
Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
I’m forty-nine but I could be twenty-five except for my face and my legs.
My answer is: Recognize yourself in others.
The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.
Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self.
Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.
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.
From Ernest Hemingway’s stories, I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.
Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.
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.
The gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind’s eye only, fade out in sand.
You can’t change a regime on the basis of compassion. There’s got to be something harder.
Communists are the last optimists.
There’s no tiling moral about beauty.