The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.
Time is change; we measure its passage by how much things alter.
Books dont need batteries
My answer is: Recognize yourself in others
I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.
The facts are always less than what really happened.
Mostly I’m interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.
People give one another things that can’t be gift wrapped.
Newspapers are horror happening to other people.
Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self
Writing is making sense of life.
Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.
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.
A desert is a place without expectation.
Sentiment is for those who don’t know what to do next.
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.
Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.
Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.
The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.
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.
what a writer does is to try to make sense of life. I think that’s what writing is, I think that’s what painting is. It’s seeking that thread of order and logic in the disorder, and the incredible waste and marvelous profligate character of life. What all artists are trying to do is to make sense of life.
I cannot live with someone who can’t live without me.
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.
Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.
