Very often we support change, and then are swept away by the change. I think that...you just make your own response to your own generation. A response adequate to your time.

The Communist Party is very popular in South Africa, especially among the young people. Never having had a chance to travel, and having suffered so much under capitalism, they still can't believe that the Russian people themselves have rejected it.

what a writer does is to try to make sense of life. I think that's what writing is, I think that's what painting is. It's seeking that thread of order and logic in the disorder, and the incredible waste and marvelous profligate character of life. What all artists are trying to do is to make sense of life.

I couldn't be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.

From Ernest Hemingway's stories I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.

A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.

It was a miracle; it was all a miracle: and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles are horror.