Night-time is when I brainstorm; last thing, when the family's asleep and I'm alone, I think about the next day's writing and plan a strategy for my assault on the blank page.

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

Creativity is very selfish. Scandalously so, in fact.

There is a desperate tendency to try to legislate artists, to try to lay down rules for their obligations to society. Just leave artists alone. If you are a true artist, you will have a very finely tuned moral mechanism.

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

What I quickly discovered is that our so-called new South Africa has as much material for a story-teller as the old one. The landscape hasn't really changed. Who is in power now is different to who was in power then, but the squatter camps grow like cancer, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

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