In a country like South Africa, writers have nuisance value, because those of us who have become known overseas have certainly helped to inform people about what life is like there.

A desert is a place without expectation.

The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.

A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.

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

Peace. The upland serenity of high altitude, the openness of grassland without indigenous bush or trees; the greening, yellowing or silver-browning that prevailed, according to season.

Writing is making sense of life.

Perhaps the best definition of progress would be the continuing efforts of men and women to narrow the gap between the convenience of the powers that be and the unwritten charter.

I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.

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

Time is change; we measure its passage by how much things alter.

Dark circles under my eyes sink deeper and deeper into my skull, in contrast to my pale skin there is an undeniable resemblance to a fresh corpse.

How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.

When your sky is covered with the clouds of sadness, smile like the sun and paint your own rainbow.

I don't like people around me sad. I like making people happy.

I predict you will sink step by step into a bottomless quagmire, however much you spend in men and money." (On Vietnam War)

Lots of you know me as a lone, hard-bitten columnist, prone to lurking on deserted rocky promontories while searching for my muse.

The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story.

I have a hard time writing. Most writers have a hard time writing. I have a harder time than most because I'm lazier than most. I don't want to brag, but I'm the laziest person I have ever known.

We are content in the 'given' in sensation's quest. We have been metamorphosised from a mad body dancing on hillsides to a pair of eyes staring in the dark.

I don't exist to build a genre. I exist to build the Kingdom.