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.

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.

The function of a writer is to make sense of life. It is such a mystery, it changes all the time, like the light.

You can't be afraid to do good in case evil results.

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

The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful.

Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.