I don't think I am a citizen of the world; I am very much a citizen of my own country. But my own country is closely related to other parts of the world and influenced by what happens there.

A desert is a place without expectation.

Writers themselves don't analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.

If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there'd be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.

And this indifference is still very much present in modern South Africa. Just listen to Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer - a representative of the British elite in this country: Afrikaner women are lower than rats, closer related to plants, just fit enough to be raped in an act of genus preservation.

In a certain sense a writer is 'selected' by his subject - his subject being the consciousness of his own era.

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