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.
Time is change; we measure its passage by how much things alter.
Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you’ve made sense of one small area.
I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.
Can you imagine a writer in England influencing? Absolutely not. And in France? It used to be, but no more-absolutely not. France used to, at least, have writers as diplomats, but not any more.
What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there’s another force from inside battling to make us something else.
Writing is making sense of life.
I don’t think I am a citizen of the world; I am very much a citizen of my own country. But my own country is closely related to other parts of the world and influenced by what happens there.
Your whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place– a single book written from different stages of your ability.
When I was a child, we seemed to be living in a world remote from the rest of the world. But television has made a great difference to all of us.
The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It’s quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.
One can’t measure how a mood of confidence comes about.
A desert is a place without expectation.
The primacy of the word, basis of the human psyche, that has in our age been used for mind-bending persuasion and brain-washing pulp, disgraced by Gobbles and debased by advertising copy, remains a force for freedom that flies out between all bars.
A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.
I couldn’t be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.
Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature.
Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.
There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.