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

Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light - and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau - into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.

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.

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.

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

In a democracy - even if it is a so-called democracy like our white-?litist one - the greatest veneration one can show the rule of law is to keep a watch on it, and to reserve the right to judge unjust laws and the subversion of the function of the law by the power of the state. That vigilance is the most important proof of respect for the law.

I cannot live with someone who can't live without me.