When I was a child, we seemed to be living in a world remote from the rest of the world. But television has made a great difference to all of us.

Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.

The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.

I'm forty-nine but I could be twenty-five except for my face and my legs.

You can't be afraid to do good in case evil results.

When I was a child, we seemed to be living in a world remote from the rest of the world. But television has made a great difference to all of us. If something happens where I live, you see it tomorrow or perhaps even at the same time it is happening there. It's not "one world" in the sense that conflicts are resolved in the world. But we are more one world in that we know what is going on and are psychologically influenced by what goes on around us.

And this indifference is still very much present in modern South Africa. Just listen to Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer - a representative of the British elite in this country: Afrikaner women are lower than rats, closer related to plants, just fit enough to be raped in an act of genus preservation.