Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.

Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.

The facts are always less than what really happened.

In a country like South Africa, writers have nuisance value, because those of us who have become known overseas have certainly helped to inform people about what life is like there.

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

I have learned since that sometimes the things we want most are impossible for us. You may long to come home, yet wander forever.

The primacy of the word, basis of the human psyche, that has in our age been used for mind-bending persuasion and brain-washing pulp, disgraced by Gobbles and debased by advertising copy, remains a force for freedom that flies out between all bars.