The damage done in one year can sometimes take ten or twenty years to repair.

Whenever I try to do anything on a typewriter, it's like having this machine between me and the words; what comes out is not quite what would come out if I were scribbling.

If you have leaders who are prepared to incite group against group it is very easy to manufacture reasons and excuses.

The Novelist As Teacher”: “I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past – with all its imperfections – was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them.

I believe in the complexity of the human story, and that there's no way you can tell that story in one way and say, 'this is it.' Always there will be someone who can tell it differently depending on where they are standing ... this is the way I think the world's stories should be told: from many different perspectives.

The language of young men is pull down and destroy; but an old man speaks of conciliation.

When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk