The gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind's eye only, fade out in sand.

I decided that I wanted nothing to do with South African government television while any of my fellow writers were banned and couldn't speak publicly.

Perhaps the best way to write is to do so as if one were already dead, afraid of no one's reactions, answerable to no one's views.

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

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

Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.

Can you imagine writers influencing things in America? Can you imagine a writer in England influencing? Absolutely not. And in France? It used to be, but no more - absolutely not. France used to, at least, have writers as diplomats, but not any more.