The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.

Books dont need batteries

Once you have some sort of reputation in the outside world, they will try to woo you. They will say, "Won't you come and be on a talk program about books? That's not political." Then they can say to the outside world, "See how free it is, she appears on television. See how free it is." So I refused to have anything of mine read or dramatized on South African television.

The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.

In a certain sense a writer is 'selected' by his subject - his subject being the consciousness of his own era.

September 2001. A sunny day in New York. Many of us who are writers were at work on the transformation of life into a poem, story, a chapter of a novel, when terror pounced from the sky, and the world made witness to it.

If you live in Europe . . . things change . . . but continuity never seems to break. You don't have to throw the past away.