Where do whites fit in the New Africa? Nowhere, I'm inclined to sayand I do believe that it is true that even the gentlest and most westernised Africans would like the emotional idea of the continent entirely without the complication of the presence of the white man for a generation or two. But nowhere, as an answer for us whites, is in the same category as remarks like What's the use of living? in the face of the threat of atomic radiation. We are living; we are in Africa.

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

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.

Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.

A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.

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.

You can't change a regime on the basis of compassion. There's got to be something harder.