I read all of Rider Haggard’s books. For me he had the romance of Africa with a little bit of mysticism. I’m delighted to be looked on as his heir and be categorised as an adventure novelist because that’s exactly what I am.
Cape Town’s beaches are superb and while the water on the Atlantic side is damn cold, it’s very pleasant on the other side. Bring your golf clubs if you play – Cape Town has some fabulous golf courses.
I go on a hunting safari at least once a year to Botswana, which is fantastic because we have a huge area of wilderness entirely to ourselves. My island covers roughly 55 acres, which again I have to myself, with nearly half a kilometre of private beach with my own jetties and boats.
Failure makes success so much sweeter, and allows you to thumb your nose at the crowds.
All my characters have got a big slice of me in them. A big piece of me, because it’s my dialogue and this is the way I think and talk.
I don’t want children. Why should I let some strange little monster into my life to destroy what to me is a perfect set-up?
Write for yourself, not for a perceived audience. If you do, you’ll mostly fall flat on your face, because it’s impossible to judge what people want. And you have to read. That’s how you learn what is good writing and what is bad. Then the main thing is application. It’s hard work.
They do say that socialism is the ideal philosophy-just as long as you have capitalists to pay for it.
I read a lot of biographies and books with an African background.
I love the sea as much as I love the veldt of Africa.
I grew up in Rhodesia on my father’s ranch and every year he used to take us on safari in some remote area of the wilderness.
I have never had too much trouble for creative ideas to spring up in my mind.
I know it’s politically incorrect but I enjoy things like the kick boxing and cock fighting.
I think one of the most poignant things is unrequited love and loneliness.
I shot my first lion at the age of 14 when a pride threatened my father’s livestock while he was away on holiday.
I want to be seen as a good storyteller. I’m a manipulator as well.
I put my soul into every book I write.
I’m not a prophet I can only use historical reality to come to a view of the future, and my view is that Africa will return to being African and not European. The advent of colonialism was foreign to the country itself, but it will return to what it was before the Europeans arrived.
Litigation only makes lawyers fat.
Let it simply be said that we know more about the details of the hours immediately before and the actual death of Jesus, in and near Jerusalem, than we know about the death of any other one man in all the ancient world.