I shall never write an autobiography, I’m much too jealous of my privacy for that.
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.
I have learned since that sometimes the things we want most are impossible for us. You may long to come home, yet wander forever.
The function of a writer is to make sense of life. It is such a mystery, it changes all the time, like the light.
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.
In a certain sense a writer is ‘selected’ by his subject – his subject being the consciousness of his own era.
Writers themselves don’t analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.
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.
You can’t be afraid to do good in case evil results.
Newspapers are horror happening to other people.
People give one another things that can’t be gift wrapped.
The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful.
A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
I cannot live with someone who can’t live without me.
If I dreamt this, while walking, walking in the London streets, the subconscious of each and every other life, past and present, brushing me in passing, what makes it real? Writing it down.