The facts are always less than what really happened.
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.
The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable.
Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.
It was a miracle; it was all a miracle: and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles are horror.
Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.
Writing is always a voyage of discovery.
Peace. The upland serenity of high altitude, the openness of grassland without indigenous bush or trees; the greening, yellowing or silver-browning that prevailed, according to season.
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.
The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.
Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.
Mostly I’m interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
I shall never write an autobiography, I’m much too jealous of my privacy for that.
Sentiment is for those who don’t know what to do next.
Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light – and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau – into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.
Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.
Mumbling obeisance to abhorrence of apartheid is like those lapsed believers who cross themselves when entering a church.
If one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay on in Africa.
In various and different circumstances certain objects and individuals are going to turn out to be vital. The wager of survival cannot, by its nature, reveal which, in advance of events.
Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.