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.

The primacy of the word, basis of the human psyche, that has in our age been used for mind-bending persuasion and brain-washing pulp, disgraced by Gobbles and debased by advertising copy, remains a force for freedom that flies out between all bars.

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

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

Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.

About the joys and the courage, I really don't know what other people think. I just know that I've never left Africa. I've lived there all my life. And one of the wonderful things, in spite of all the terrible things that happen in South Africa, is the way people continue to keep their dignity.

If one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay on in Africa