I couldn’t be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.
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.
Music has no limits of a life-span.
Well, you know, in the fundamentalist milieu of the Afrikaners, there was a sense that they were a chosen people, that they were bringing civilization to the blacks.
Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.
Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.
The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it.
Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.
Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.