Perhaps the best definition of progress would be the continuing efforts of men and women to narrow the gap between the convenience of the powers that be and the unwritten charter.

When I was a child, we seemed to be living in a world remote from the rest of the world. But television has made a great difference to all of us.

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 democracy - even if it is a so-called democracy like our white-?litist one - the greatest veneration one can show the rule of law is to keep a watch on it, and to reserve the right to judge unjust laws and the subversion of the function of the law by the power of the state. That vigilance is the most important proof of respect for the law.

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

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

A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.