From Ernest Hemingway’s stories, I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.
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.
But a human being, she, she, cannot simply exist; she is a hurricane, every thought bending and crossing its coherence inside her, nothing will let her be, not for a moment. Every emotion, every thought, is invaded by another.
The old phrases crack and meaning shakes out wet and new.
In every encounter between human beings there is a pace set that belongs to them, and that will be taken up in its own rhythm whenever they are together.
That night they made love, the kind of love-making that is another country, a country of its own, not yours or mine.
The past has no wholeness, it has been etiolated by revised explanations of it, trampled over by hindsight – all their lives.
The desert. No seasons of bloom and decay. Just the endless turn of night and day. Out of time: and she is gazing- not over it, taken into it, for it has no measure of space, features that mark distance from here to there. In a film of haze there is no horizon, the pallor of sand, pink-traced, lilac-luminous with its own colour of faint light, has no demarcation from land to air. Sky-haze is indistinguishable from sand-haze. All drifts together, and there is no onlooker; the desert is eternity.
I’ll go back. I’ll go back through that Kruger Park. After the war, if there are no bandits any more, our mother may be waiting for us. And maybe when we left our grandfather, he was only left behind, he found his way somehow, slowly, through the Kruger Park, and he’ll be there. They’ll be home, and I’ll remember them.
Equality was not freedom, it had only been the mistaken yearning to become like the people of the town. And who wanted to become like the very ones feared and hated? Envy was not freedom.
You know history better than I do, you’ve been teaching all your life. Without real opposition you get dictators down the line. Idi, Amin, Mugabe. No democracy without opposition.
Everyone wears the uniform of how he sees himself or how he disguises himself.
To discover the exact location of a ‘thing’ is a simple matter of factual research. To discover the exact location of a person: where to locate the self?
Love doesn’t cast out fear but makes it possible to weep, howl, at least.
So everything is something else.