My answer is: Recognize yourself in others

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

About the joys and the courage, I really don't know what other people think. I just know that I've never left Africa. I've lived there all my life. And one of the wonderful things, in spite of all the terrible things that happen in South Africa, is the way people continue to keep their dignity.

Perhaps the best way to write is to do so as if one were already dead, afraid of no one's reactions, answerable to no one's views.

The primacy of the word, basis of the human psyche, that has in our age been used for mind-bending persuasion and brain-washing pulp, disgraced by Gobbles and debased by advertising copy, remains a force for freedom that flies out between all bars.

All worthwhile writing... comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.

Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.