Nobody can take what I love away from me. I would like to believe that love is the only energy I've ever used as a writer. I've never written out of anger, although anger has informed love.

Love is the only energy I’ve ever used as a writer. I’ve never written out of anger, although anger has informed love.

You can't answer violence with counter violence ... The answer is love. The best sabotage is love.

As fascinated as I was by words on paper, it was matched by my fascination with words in people's mouths. The spoken word. And that is the world of theatre.

To know nothing about yourself is to be constantly in danger of nothingness, those voids of non-being over which a man walks the tightrope of his life.

If the nature of human experience changes with the color of a man's skin, then the racists have been right all along.

For you in the West to hear the phrase 'All men are created equal' is to draw a yawn. For us, it's a miracle. We're starting out at rock bottom, man. But South Africa does have soul.

Without white South Africa realizing what it had done - and on the basis of that realization having the courage to ask for forgiveness - there can really be no significant movement.

We compound our suffering by victimizing each other.

Life is just a plain bloody mess, that's all. And people are fools.

Every boy needs a role model that he can be proud of and talk about to the other kids in the playground.

A dog reflects the family life. Whoever saw a frisky dog in a gloomy family, or a sad dog in a happy one? Snarling people have snarling dogs, dangerous people have dangerous ones.

We’d never talked about his parents, like he was some underwater Peter Pan.

The eagerness of a listener quickens the tongue of a narrator.

When thee builds a prison, thee had better build with the thought ever in thy mind that thee and thy children may occupy the cells.

Madame....gloatingly savored her words as earlier she had savored her pig's trotter.

Book tours are excellent things, and one is lucky to get to go on one, but they have a way of leeching away one's will to live.

The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning.

In art there are only two types of people: revolutionaries and plagiarists

I believe that creativity comes from compromise. If you could have everything you ever wanted, it doesn't always work.

I like to see the people awake and alert.