Writing is making sense of life.

It's absolutely fatal to your writing to think about how your work will be received. It's a betrayal of whatever talent you have.

One can't measure how a mood of confidence comes about.

I don't understand writers who feel they shouldn't have to do any of the ordinary things of life, because I think that this is necessary: one has to keep in touch with that... The ordinary action of taking a dress down to the dry cleaner's or spraying some plants infected with greenfly is a very sane and good thing to do. It brings one back, so to speak. It also brings the world back.

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.

Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.

There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.