Communists are the last optimists.

The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it.

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 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.

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

I'm forty-nine but I could be twenty-five except for my face and my legs.

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.