“The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.”

“Books don’t need batteries”

“What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there's another force from inside battling to make us something else.”

“The facts are always less than what really happened.”

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

“The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.”

“My answer is: Recognize yourself in others”

“Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self”

“I'm a candle flame that sways in currents of air you can't see. You need to be the one who steadies me to burn.”

“The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.”

“I don't want to know more about her; don't want to know her weaknesses or calculate them. What I have is not for her; he gives me to understand she would not know what to do with it; it's not her fault. --One is married and there is nothing to be done.-- Yet he has said to me, I would marry you if I could, meaning: I want very much to marry you. I offended him a bit by not being moved. It's other things he's said that are the text I'm living by. I really do not know if I want any form of public statement, status, code; such as marriage. There's nothing more private and personal than the life of a mistress, is there? Outwardly, no one even knows we are responsible to each other....

'This is the creature that has never been' - he told me a line of poetry about that unicorn, translated from German. A mythical creature. Un paradis inventé. ”

“Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.”

“Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.”

“Your whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place– a single book written from different stages of your ability.”

“It's easier for the former masters to put aside the masks that hid their humanity than for the former slaves to recognise the faces underneath. Or to trust that this is not a new mask these are wearing.”

“Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.”

“...with an understanding of Shakespeare there comes a release from the gullibility that makes you prey to the great shopkeeper who runs the world, and would sell you cheap to illusion.”

“Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity”

“At four in the afternoon the old moon bleeds radiance into the grey sky.”

“you like to have some cup of tea?-July bent at the doorway and began that day for them as his kind has always done for their kind.”

“If I dreamt this, while walking, walking in the London streets, the subconscious of each and every other life, past and present, brushing me in passing, what makes it real? Writing it down.”

“Rebirth. I mean by this simply what happens when the child begins to realise the fact that the black does not enter through the white’s front door is not in the same category as the fact that the dead will never come back.”

“That's it on the maps; nature doesn't acknowledge frontiers. Neither can ecology... Where to begin to understand what we've only got a computerspeak label for, ecosystem? Where to decide it begins.”

Source: UFS.ac.za