A desert is a place without expectation.

Mumbling obeisance to abhorrence of apartheid is like those lapsed believers who cross themselves when entering a church.

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.

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

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

The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.

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.