Newspapers are horror happening to other people.

A desert is a place without expectation.

Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.

Writers themselves don't analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.

When it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.

I would be guilty only if I were innocent of working to destroy racism in my country.

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.

What it really was like to live a life determined by the struggle to be free, as desert dwellers' days are determined by the struggle against thirst and those of dwellers amid snow and ice by the struggle against the numbing of cold.

They say (she had read somewhere) that no one ever disappears, up in the atmosphere, stratosphere, whatever you call space -- atoms infinitely minute, beyond conception of existence, are up there forever, from the whole world, from all time.

About the joys and the courage, I really don't know what other people think. I just know that I've never left Africa. I've lived there all my life. And one of the wonderful things, in spite of all the terrible things that happen in South Africa, is the way people continue to keep their dignity.

The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable.

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.

If you live in Europe ... things change ... but continuity never seems to break. You don't have to throw the past away.

Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.

The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.

From Ernest Hemingway's stories I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.

What is shameful cannot be shared. What is shameful, separates.

I shall never write an autobiography, I'm much too jealous of my privacy for that.

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.

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.