The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.
I'm a candle flame that sways in currents of air you can't see. You need to be the one who steadies me to burn.
Books don't need batteries.
The facts are always less than what really happened.
Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.
My answer is: Recognize yourself in others
The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.
Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self
The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.
Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.
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.
I cannot live with someone who can't live without me.
A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.
Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.
Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.
At four in the afternoon the old moon bleeds radiance into the grey sky.
I don't cry. Unfortunately, I seem rather short of tears, so my sorrows have to stay inside me.
...with an understanding of Shakespeare there comes a release from the gullibility that makes you prey to the great shopkeeper who runs the world, and would sell you cheap to illusion.
It's easier for the former masters to put aside the masks that hid their humanity than for the former slaves to recognise the faces underneath. Or to trust that this is not a new mask these are wearing.
Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity
I am an African. I am white. I, in my humble way, and others in their much more brave way, have earned that right.
Death is really the mystery of life, isn't it?
If you ask, 'What happens when we die? Why do we die?' you are asking, 'Why do we live?
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.
A desert is a place without expectation.
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.
You like to have some cup of tea?-July bent at the doorway and began that day for them as his kind has always done for their kind.
You can't change a regime on the basis of compassion. There's got to be something harder.
The creative act is not pure.
I would be guilty only if I were innocent of working to destroy racism in my country.
Communists are the last optimists.
That's it on the maps; nature doesn't acknowledge frontiers. Neither can ecology... Where to begin to understand what we've only got a computerspeak label for, ecosystem? Where to decide it begins.
The past has no wholeness, it has been etiolated by revised explanations of it, trampled over by hindsight - all their lives.
How did I find out? I was deceiving him.
I'm happy to be a card-carrying member of the ANC.
I'm an atheist. I wouldn't even call myself an agnostic. I am an atheist.
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.
Music has no limits of a life-span.
